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Killing Off Linux: It's All Academic
angelh writes "Here's a good article that I don't think we should ignore. It's about Microsoft's plan of attack against Linux... Make a better product? Of course not. Better marketing? Not this time. Looks like now they're getting serious about attacking UNIX/Linux at the root level... Check out the link for a good read..." The article is from Linux Journal. It's not new, and the thoughts in it aren't either, but it's well worth reading. Check out the bibliography at the bottom, too.
I LOVE linux, both in principle, in $ savings, and in utility. But do you think M$ could develop a better OS if they put money into it? Oh hell yeah, and I bet they are already doing so in some deep lab at Redmond (that's my conspiracy theory for today anyhow).
Look, pretend for a second you are Bill G. You've got a ton of cash up the wazoo, you -really- like computers and spend all your time thinking up ways for technology to advance in forms like wearable computers, worldwide internet technology, etc. Do you think he is dumb enough to just let Linux win? Not a chance. He's going to go balls to the wall developing and OS that takes things to a new level, learning from Linux and the thousands of developers that work on it for free and stealing the ideas behind them all without the slightest repercussion (how do YOU enjoy working for Microsoft?). He's not going to make huge mistakes in buggy software anymore, he'll soon stop developing exclusively for the AOLuddites and other technophobes and work on an OS that everyone can use, one that doesn't crash, is cheap, is portable, and can win.
All the way through this he's going to look at the world that he is helping to create with the entire thought that he is doing us all a big big favour. And he's right. As much as Windows needs competition, Linux needs it more. In order to develop something that can compete, we're going to have to capture the workstation market.
Now think about that...Windows has the workstation market by the balls. Linux is making very minor headroads in this, but is not yet a real competitor. Linux has the ability as it is to have the server market by the balls in the same way. Yet we're moving to a situation where Linux developers are just barely starting to move to the workstation market. Tie the two together, mix and meld, and you've got our Buddy Bill using Linux principles to develop a great operating system capable of taking over both the server and workstation markets.
Will I use this new mix of OS? Damned rights. After seeing just how difficult it is comparative to get a Linux workstation up and running (setting up X anyhow) to the same level as a Win98 system, I'd have a huge temptation to use and OS that was completely usable in a 1/2 hour of installation without worrying too terribly much about hardware compatibility, that was stable for extended periods, and didn't have a learning curve that could stun a goat.
TheGeek
http://www.geekrights.org
TheGeek
http://www.geekrights.org
Kill the monkey
Oh, wow, where the beginning UNIX lab is ps, talk, and chmod and the advanced UNIX lab is writing very small shell scripts... that's about it for the UNIX stuff, other than putting a web page on the campus network and reading newsgroups with tin.
I think the other labs are way more useless... MS Excel and MS Access... thank goodness they dropped the MS Word lab when I took it. I'm glad someone on my hall had MS Office installed, because I didn't want to have to actually walk down to the NT cluster to do those labs :P
If you are a student why don't you make some handouts about an "alternative" and distribute them to your fellow students to prevent this from happening ?
I am doing just that.
The head of the CS department at IU is a die-hard Java fan. Passing out Windows to the rest of the school won't matter. They're not going to be the ones doing the installs in all these places, it's going to be the CS people. They'll have enough training to know better than to use Windows.
I fail to see how cheap deals on NT could be cost-effective for universities and schools. There would need to be free or cheap hardware with the software for it to be even considered as competition with *BSD or Linux, and I bet the likes of Sun to mega-discounts for educational establishments.
Why buy a quad PIII Xeon with 512MB RAM as a server when you could have a much more inexpensive box (or boxes) running a unix giving equivalent performance and much more functionality?
I was introduced to UNIX at uni, (Solaris/SunOS) and it was as if my prayers had been answered! An operating system that does what you'd expect one to be able to do, in a simple, clear logical way. I was going to buy a PC with NeXTStep on it but then Linux came along....
Why should the world take a gigantic backwards step to NT?
Why pay $$$ for something when you can get something free that's better?
Am I stupid or something? What am I missing?
I'm out of my tree just now but please feel free to leave a banana.
Yep.
AS a matter of fact, most of the machines in my lab used to be IRIX machines.. Now, as you all know, SGI machines are very very expensive. Now our lab is phasing out all our SGI machines, and most of the new development in the lab is done using the donated Microsoft machines (onto which for obvious political reasons we cannot install linux).
Most of this code is difficult to port since it deals with video streams (and most video APIs are rather different).
Hopefully, soon we will have a few dual-bootmachines before all of our unix machines go away.
And its not just the Universities... Many research labs are doing their research on NT... and for obvious reasons, the students who ome back from these labs continue to use NT back at school. (Again, I can't mention specific names for obvious political reasons)
Its a sad state of affairs..
If only IBM or SUN or some other large company would get off their butt and figure out that the universities can do quite well with pure hardware donations...
We can install the OS ourselves...
hmmm.. That's like saying Microsoft isn't all bad, because you can run non MS apps on a windows box.
This is not a situation where Prof. Shmoe walks up to an M$ marketer in a park somewhere and saying "I want (virtually) free software so I can teach our poor, impressionable youth the Joi Du Bill!"... it's more akin to the marketer standing around with a megaphone shouting "I'VE GOT FREE SOFTWARE TO GIVE AWAY TO UNIVERSITY TYPE-PEOPLE! JUST STEP RIGHT UP AND ASK!"
Don't forget the debacle earlier on this year (late last year?) where M$ was giving a 'bounty' for teachers using thier products. Looks like that tactic backfired pretty bad and they're going for a more subtle get it in the back door approach.
Hmm... maybe M$ is learning something from Linux after all.
--
rickf@transpect.SPAM-B-GONE.net (remove the SPAM-B-GONE bit)
"People will pay big bucks for the luxury of ignorance."
Check out the rathskeller; they've got some.
when i went there, the little cmapus stores sold coke (and JOLT!)
Besides $$, the other thing MS has on it's side is time. They can keep chipping away, giving away products. It doesn't have to happen overnight. Remember Netscape? They just kept chipping away, once they were determined to have that market. Fortunately, they have shown their cards one time too many. Everyone by now knows what their strategy is, but the scary thing is, with universities so cash strapped these days, wil it matter to the administrative people who handle the $$?
And even though most people in recent years used Macs at their high school, most of them went on to use.. what, Macintosh, you say? Of course not.. Windows!
When I was in college, we had two large Mac computer labs, and people were using (and buying Macs) to use for their schoolwork. (There was also a PC lab, for people who had their own PCs at home or that they brought with them). I was friends with the IT person at my college, because one of my roommates worked for him helping to keep them maintained and we were all Apple enthusiasts. We not only helped people to use them, we were helping people to use them beyond "how do I change the font for my report?"
Near the end of my college career, I began to hear comments like "why don't we use the machines that we'll be encountering in the real world?" I assume that someone in the administration took these comments to heart; I went back to visit this past summer and the two Mac labs are now PC labs, and the old PC lab is now the Mac lab.
Jay (=
I haven't heard any talk of having to switch servers to NT. I'm a Computer Technology student and NT is already used everywhere in CPT. The CS and engineering departments are heavily Unix, and don't seem to be wanting to change that anytime soon. I especially wouldn't want to lose our Linux mirrors.
i think it's not ironic but sad.
because there are mostly more advantages when moving avay from MS than disadvantages but people are staying with MS just because they are not willing to learn anything new.
and in academic it's not just sad but disastrous!!!
hany
The University of Washington (just across the lake from the Redmond Monopoly) is under heavy "attack" from Microsoft:
1) The old terminal payroll mainframe is being replaced by a server running Microsoft Windows NT. One could access the old, clunky system via a telnet session from just about any OS, but the new system runs over the "Web" using Micosoft Active Server Pages, yet requires Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.0 or higher running Microsoft Windows 95 or higher to access it. Disgusting.
References:
http://www.washington.edu/user/hardware.html
http://www.washington.edu/user/techserv.html
2) Microsoft Office, normally available for $400+, costs around $40. (Assuming you get the purchase order version, that is). It sure would be nice if other companies offered an order of magnitude off the price of their products for academic use.
There's probably a few more things going on, but the above two are my main pet peeves.
Universities ought to be using Windows and teaching the skills that are most in demand (like VB), so as to produce marketable graduates.
They can teach whatever they want to teach to best equip their students (read as "produce marketable graduates" if you will) but they should use free software for their own infrastructure.
Jay (=
the biggest *nix/*bsd supporters are in the CS and CE (computer engineering) departments, and to get those degrees you must take Unix Programming. So they can't go all NT. Anyway the only people who can be persuaded by Microsoft like that are such simpletons that they would've ended up running Windows anyway
I work for the computing department of a small Massachusetts liberal-arts college. Now you mightn't think that a school of those characteristics would be a haven for Linux-based systems, but we are.
First off, all our central information services except the administrative databases (MacOS - FileMaker Pro), the library catalog (AIX), the voicemail system, and two legacy servers (one SunOS, one NT 3.51) run on Debian GNU/Linux systems. That includes mail, user accounts, DNS, Web service, Web proxy service, Web-based database applications, networked backup, file and print service (samba and netatalk), and routing / firewalling / network monitoring.
Further, we have an extensive Linux (and to a lesser extent BSD) subculture among our students. My boss teaches courses involving Linux, Perl, and other related Unixoid topics, and is in the process of building a CS curriculum on the basis of students' interest in Unix. Our computing staffing situation is dependent on student interest in Unix, as we tend to recruit from our own recent graduates.
We received last year an offer from Microsoft for cheap software in exchange for a mindshare monopoly. We seriously considered it -- for about five seconds. Then it went in the circular file. We may be liberal-arts flakes, but we're not idiots!
Please read; though it may sound like flamebait, it brings up a few poignant issues.
"Here's the situation. In the U.S. and abroad, governments just aren't providing the money colleges and universities need to meet sharply increased demands for computing services."
Yup, it starts off with the left-liberal complaint: lack of government funding. And it goes on:
"But the need for vendor assistance may override such concerns. As California State University (CSU) chancellor Charles Reed keeps saying, if you're nervous about vendor funding for campus computing infrastructures, there's only one remedy: "Get used to it."
It so happens that CSU chancellor Reed understands that efficient free markets and private business, NOT bureaucrats or government officials, should guide large institutional decisions.
It should be the students, NOT the taxpayers, that should subsidize any upgrade to a school campus. And if the students or institution cannot afford it, the school must either: [1] close, go out of business (since it was probably inefficient and mismanaged) or [2] seek vendor funding/support. There is absolutely nothing wrong with either scenario, and the long-term effect is better education for all students and the elimination of sub-standard schools.
Now how does this relate to Linux/Unix?
We already know that the Unix/Mac vendors have tried their so-called "monopolistic" practices in educational institutions for years - now there's outcry when Microsoft does the same? What hypocrisy!
And about Linux... this can be the true test of Linux' "freedom." Can anyone make an economically viable model that is as efficient as Microsoft's that can beat out MS's deal to universities in a free market? Didn't think so... so if Linux cannot survive the free market test, it cannot accurately be a "free" software.
After all, the markets will decide, and so far Microsoft is still winning. Linux is a good operating system technically, but the GNU General Public Virus is what makes it economically unviable. Its advocates should really examine the self-destructive nature of supporting the GPL in the Free Market of a truly Free Society.
To realize the power of truly free markets and pure freedom, check out these links:
http://www.capitalism.org
http://www.aynrand.org
http://www.lp.org
Cornell duplicates Los Alamos innovation after 3 years of brutal hacking
Researchers at Cornell University have demonstrated an NT-based cluster computer, the NT-O-Wulf, which offers some of the performance and some of the stability of its Linux counterpart for institutions interested in purchasing expensive commercial ports of freely available message passing software.
Robert Constable, Cornell's new dean for Microsoft services (CMS) believes that AC3 and AC3 Velocity will be valuable assets in his strategic vision for whoring out undergraduate research assistants and underpaid faculty to offer free R&D to giant corporations. "Windows 2000 and Intel architecture-based cluster computing are the direction of the future," he said. "The Theory Center is an integral part of CIS and we're delighted that they are taking a leadership position in this arena."
Remember that what's inside of you doesn't matter because nobody can see it.
From what I've seen, professors usually hang on to old technology longer than you think they would, but that's not necessarily bad. Why try to keep up with the latest OS craze when you're working on some specialized form of neural networks and your current development environment is sufficient?
From this standpoint, I don't think that unix can be killed very quickly. Though I'll be frightened when I see one of my professors going to a Microsoft training session. :)
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
It is absolutely amazing that Unix weenies are up in arms about this.
Unix -- for the past twenty years -- has literally had a 100% monopoly on the education system. In my four year degree, I learned NOTHING except Unix. All programming classes were Unix. The operating systems design class was Unix.
The only reason Unix has become a dominant force today -- to being quite literally the only choice of operating system today -- is because of the education system.
Now it seems that Unix may reduce its market share from 100% to 98% and Unix weenies are whining, as usual. "Oh no!! Microsoft may gain two extra users".
This is absolute FUD. Unix weenies REALLY need to look into the mirror and ask who has the undisputed marketshare in educational space.
According to my university, no operating system besides Unix exists. At least, no other system was ever mentioned in any course, even the operating systems design course!
I really hope that Microsoft gains some marketshare in the educational space, so students understand that there is more than one operating system.
Of course, if Unix weenies have their way, any system besides Unix will be totally censored from the curriculum -- I guess the quality of Unix technology is so low, that they need to hide everything else for it to survive!!
Also, with Linux one can slip in a kernel module at any time. Is anything else comparable?
On NT, there's application aplenty that require a reboot. For some unfathomable reason, apps designed for MS-Windows tend to pack their own libraries that they like to stick in the system directories, then make you reboot before you can use the application.
Have you ever installed anything on Linux/UNIX that requires a reboot (besides a new kernel)?
-Matthead
If MS had started this in the early 90's, it might have headed off the free Unixes. However, I think it's too late now. You have one gratis commercial office suite and several Free office suites coming into their own as well as newer desktop enviroments. A free/cheap copy of msoffice or mswindows just isn't as alluring as it used to be. The things that you can't accomplish with a !DOS OS are becoming more an more vertical/specialized as time goes on.
Im still in High school, but one of my friends that goto collage, was before he went, into security, and stability, now he is just into useability, he dosent want to be bothered with security. I have noticed this of alot of my friends who goto liberal collages. just my .02 cents
Do your part to spread linux by offering copies, insight, and support. I recently met a CIS student who said his prof. thought NT was everything. After I scoffed, the student asked about linux and we discussed how they differ. I encouraged him to pursue linux, burned him a copy of RH6 and wrote urls for /. and deja. As long as we all share what we know and learn what we don't, new users will appreciate it and will be more likely to help others in turn.
Isn't this similar to what Apple did back in the 80's? They gave great discounts to schools if they used Apple computers, and so Macintosh's are the only things I used before I got to high school because the schools are cheap when it comes to computers.
> If young kids take MS software as drug, when they go to universities & colleges, they still take it.
Office apps maybe, but not Server software.
The [unix] sysadmins know better then to trust NT servers 100% to run the campus. Linux and BSD are big in the comp sci department (at least in my college/university.) The last thing they want is to be waiting 3 months for a service pack for NT to come out, when they can download the latest security fix for Linux within a day of the hole being found. The price thing helps too.
Go ask the NT sys admins running SQL how many times they have had to come in the middle of the night because the database crapped out, or even ask them their uptime for NT?
Cheers
The University of Indiana cut a "deal" with Microsoft for $6 MILLION. With Linux, there's no deal, and even better, no COST. I don't understand how "cash-strapped" university computing departments can justify this logic: "We don't have the money, so we're giving Microsoft $6 million for something we could have gotten for free."
Apple has been trying for 15 years to corner the market under the theory that if you hook 'em in school then it will bubble up into the corporate market. Funny, it hasn't happened, despite their high market share in academia. Seems that businesses don't care what new hires would prefer.
The only difference in the argument in this article is that M$ is trying to replace the servers at schools, rather than the clients. But let's differentiate between the computers that are used to provide functionality to the school (administration, records, paper-writing, email) and the computers that are used to teach computer scientists. They're not the same. Where I went to school, the CS department was an entirely unix shop, while the rest of the campus happily used VMS and Macs-- a common setup in those days. Neither of those platforms, you will note, has gone on to take over the world.
I think that the fear expressed in this article is partly due to the age of the author. This scenario would have been scary ten years ago, when you HAD to do programming work on the big central server-- but my desktop today is more powerful than a server was back then. The computer science department no longer needs to use the big expensive central computer to teach with in the first place-- it's cheaper to fill a lab with PC's running linux. And don't forget the CS students with "servers" in their rooms-- they're happily hacking away as we speak, sharing code with each other, and couldn't care less what the school's server OS is.
No worries. You may continue with the revolution.
He's worth around $90 billion by last count I saw. MS stocks have done pretty well...
-
Well I would have been a bit pissed if my school decided to standardize on MS...
Oh yeah, First Post! (By an AC, even!)
They say how microsoft will kill Linux by selling Windows for only Six Million dollars, but Linux is Free! Linux is 6,000,000 Dollars cheaper than Windows, and this person complains that Microsoft is underpricing!
A proposal: Go to the people who run the computer shop on your campus (if such exists). Inform them of the existence of Cheapbytes, LSL, and linuxmall (add your favourite distributor of $1.99 Linux & BSD CDs). Get them to order 20 of the top three or four distros (that costs them like $50 per distro or so for a batch) from their favorite one, and sell them for $5 each.
It's likely that all it will cost them is the display space, but surely they can set aside one of the seven MS shelves to display row upon row of Linux CDs. When they see the CDs move fast, they'll hop on the bandwagon quick.
"Oh, I hope he doesn't give us halyatchkies," said Heinrich.
Intel tried to do the same thing to kill usage of the MacOS @ universities & colleges. In several cases (I think Yale was one of them, but I could be wrong), the plan met with initial success and then backfired (gave them mega-bad publicity _and_ the universities retracted their pro-Wintel policy). Hopefully the same kind of backfiring will occur this time.
It reminds me of the deals Coke gets with fast food chains and university cafeterias to only distribute Coke (and thus the university gets some kind of kick-back from Coke). Disgusting.
-cf
if you expose colege/university student to UNIX what is the probability of him staying with UNIX?
if you expose colege/university student to M$ what is the probability of him staying with M$?
i think that probability in the first one scenario is greater.
reasons: IMHO more freedom
hany
Seems like M$ is going the Unix way. Get exposed to students in their learning years and reap the benefits threreafter. How many of us were first exposed to unix in school/college? And how many of us use a unix now? The numbers speak for themselves.
BTW, this is happening in India as well. My college rejected Linux and got a NT server because the clients were Windows machines! More FUD from M$.
I can throw myself at the ground, and miss.
"Combine that with the fact that any linux user has to know so much more about the inner workings of his system to make the most of it"
that's the problem. Windows IS easier. Linux is catching up fast, but at the moment it's more difficult to use.
Why would MS try to push down to the desktop? They already own it. You might argue, and successfully, that they are pushing up to the server, but not the other way, sorry.
Je ne parle pas francais.
Most OS'es require reboots of some form when kernel or core component upgrades are performed. Hmm, I recompile my Linux kernel, and what do I have to do? REBOOT! Gah. Incidently, windows 2000 has now almost completley removed this problem...
And even though most people in recent years used Macs at their high school, most of them went on to use.. what, Macintosh, you say? Of course not.. Windows!
~ Kish
At least in the Computer Science department at Univ. of MO - Rolla, I think this is probably the rule rather than the exception. We have a number of comp sci professors who are totally incapable of reading ANY documentation or anything.
One couldn't even handle switching a shell script from sending mail w/ elm to sending mail w/ mutt. How pathetic.
Sun, IBM, HP, and Digital should follow likewise, and also give educational organizations discounts. A lot of their users and supporters are derived from the educational environment.
It really makes you wonder what "caveats" were placed on Bill's recent billion dollar "donation", doesn't it???
There's always the chance that if/when this does happen in universities, you'll have those psycho enthusiasts(sp) tearing down those NT servers left and right just to tick people off. I'm not saying it's the okay thing to do, but you know it will more then likely happen. I'd be suprised to see if the servers were left alone.
Another thought. Will MS people be setting up/configuring the servers? Doubtfully. So they will have to pay the people to redo them. And a total overhall of many of the servers would seem to me, to cost more money then it's worth. How much would licensing cost for a university to do that? Why not stay with what they have, and keep the reliability and familiarity(sp) that they have? Who knows. Any thoughts?
I don't believe MS is even done with the planning for the attack on Linux yet. Right now they are operating under a ad-hoc plan designed to mesh with the current situation, their attacks on Linux are tailored as such and fit with the DOG trial. To them the threat right now is what is what I've heard called the "big three": Sun, Oracle and IBM. They don't care about Linux yet, it's not big enough and it's not impacting their revenue stream. (yet of course.)
When Linux grows to the point of being a threat to MS which I have no doubt it will do then they will respond with their real PR, spin and flashy features campaign as per the situation at that time.
Reminds me of when I was going to Iowa State University. They constructed a Mac lab and a Windows lab side-by-side in the dorm. Early in the semester the Mac lab was always full and the Windows lab was always empty. Midway through the semester somebody discovered that you could install Castle Wolfenstein on the network. From that time on, you couldn't get any work done in the Windows lab because everybody was playing games!
So tell the University that you will have nothing to do with Windows, and you find it disgusting that your University has proprietized themselves. Then you transer....
I think that another reason for MS doing this is they really don't lose much money. How many college students do you know who will pay $500 for MS Visual Studio? Many college students just get pirated versions of software like this anyway, so MS dosen't lose any money here. As a bonus they probably cut down on some distribution of their software being pirated, because it less hassle to fork over $5 then to try and get a warez copy. Although it is also possible this adds to piracy, because since it is easier to obtain a product almost for free, more potential software pirates have copies that they can distribute.
Back to why this won't have a big effect on linux though, listen to this, the first OS I ever actully paid for was Red Hat linux. I have never paid for any MS operating system, before or after my university was giving MS products away. So it being free had no effect on my choice of OS. Also I know for a fact that many people in my school use linux. The people who know a lot about computers, choose between MS and linux and I don't think MS being free has much of an effect on their choice. These people who know a lot about computers usually have a way of getting software for free, either from a friend or the internet, and most people I know have absoultly NO qualms about pirating MS products. The people who don't know much about computers will likely not use linux anyway, for now at least.
Finally I think for something as basic as an operating system , most people have well rooted preferences before they get into college, and so their OS preference is not affected much by this. Where i do think this will have an effect, is in the choice of an IDE(Interative Development Environment). Many students in CS who haven't ever programmed before, will not have used an IDE before and so will be more open to a free choice. I have to admit that the one MS product that I like to use, is MS Visual Studio. I think this was at least in some way tied to the fact that I was able to get it for $5. However I imagine that I will stop using this once I find an IDE that I like for linux (which sadly will probably have to be a lot like Visual Studio).
So I think that while this may have some effect on college students using MS applications (now and in the future), I really don't see it having much of an effect on operating system preference.
1.) Start Linux/Unix User Groups and clubs on your campus. This is a great way to help students get started learning Unix and to show them that they do have freedom of choice. Lots of students have heard about Linux through various media, but don't know where to begin. Show them your Linux desktop, let them poke around, help them install Linux on their machine. Have weekly meetings where you can do installations, field questions, take on projects, etc.
2.) Get involved (if possible) with managing the workstations and servers on your campus. There are usually opportunties to help out in this area, and if you get involved, you will have a better forum for voicing your opinion.
3.) Sign petitions, make phone calls to the network admins, and do anything else you can to show the people who make the decisions, that you want freedom of choice. This may not seem like it can make a difference, but it can. If those in charge of making platform decisions hear students and faculty members voicing their opinions about freedom of choice in platforms, they will at the very least think twice about going the NT route.
As for the state of things, at WashU, I'm very fortunate to be going to a school that has long been a player in the world of Unix development. WU-FTPD, the most popular ftp daemon on the 'net began development at WashU. Most of our servers are Unix-based. We have a rather large sparc station lab. We do of course have NT labs as well, but I don't see the Unix element going away anytime soon. There is too much Unix development that goes on here. I've had a number of professors encourage us to get Linux installed on our home computers so that we can gain invaluble experience working on that platform, and so we can do the projects at home that we would ordinarily have to do in the sparc lab. There are dozens of students in the CS department (and other departments) who have Linux servers running on their ethernet dorm-room connections. It's been a lot of fun to watch the growth on campus.
--Jamin Philip Gray
jamin@DoLinux.org
Celebrate the finer things in life
After visiting the Penn State Collegian site, I was at first appalled, then gratified. As an older programmer (>35) I am happy to see that younger kids are learning nothing in school. This is great for us old guys, because now we don't have to worry about you young punks taking over our jobs.
okay - so all that's needed is one EXTREMELY disgrunted person to take that source to NT and release it anonymously on the net...this would be the best scandal in years!!! it would be great to see ALL the windows apis published and be able to fire up office flawlesslly using linux...
-- your knees hurt, don't they?
I like the "35 hours, 90 minutes, 93 seconds" part. :o)
ANd btw, the trusted good ol' NetWare 3.11 servers that I started with after graduation, had/have often uptimes of 2 to 3 years. And the NW 3.11 server from a company in Delhi showed 10 years of uptime! The funny part is, noone knew where the server actually was, the admin accessed it through rconsole, evey patch could be applied remotely and without rebooting the thing. So when the consultants from Novell came to finally upgrade the thing, they had to first FIND the server!
Yep, NetWare 3.11 was too good of a server, not many companies wanted to upgrade, which was bad for Novell. Microsoft has a much better strategy: make crap, so that companies must upgrade in vain hope of improvement. How sad.
Sigged!
How many perfectly usable clones for Windows NT can you name?
Compare that to the P3...
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
I don't use KDE/Gnome: it's too slow (though I do use kdm). When I log into X, I want in now, not in 15 seconds from now. WindowMaker does the job, Gnome/KDE do not. I'll use them when they're not so bloated.
--------
"I already have all the latest software."
So... MS is giving NT Source Code to some Universities? Sounds like a move towards open source, and peer review. And here you are bitching about it!
Can't you people decide what you want?
hmm maybe this explains why Liecester Uni in UK is roolimng out w2k right now (basing the initail on RC1). Personnally I think there off their rocker, but it will be 'interesting' to see how they go. Seems they want to reduce the number of servers running each function (email, SMS etc) down to the bare minimum, but in order to do this they need huge great machines that only w2k can cope with (16 processors etc).
Personnally I've have gone donw the *nix route, but the head of IT seems to have sold the Uni on the idea - so watch with care. It's the first big rollout of any size and lessons will be learned from this.
Isn't this sort of practice that has Microsoft in court for the antitrust trial? Correct me if I'm wrong, but insisting that Universities and other academic institutions drop all non-MS products in return for cheap software licenses is anti-competitive.
Bzzzzzt..."AAAAaaaaarrrgh!!!" Thud.
I am also a student at Purdue. Word is, that Microsoft approached Purdue a couple times before the current agreement was reached. Microsoft kept insisting that the University migrate to all Microsoft products, but Purdue faculty/administrators firmly stated that it was of utmost importance to give students experience in a multitude of operating systems, be it UNIXes, MacOS, or Microsoft Win's. Microsoft finally came around and agreed that it would be Ok for Purdue to also have non-Microsoft products and operating systems. Unfortunatley for the students of IU, it seems IU's administrators couldn't pull clout on Microsoft and caved in to Microsoft's demands. I have heard that there is intense pressure to migrate to Microsoft products
-----Transmission Complete----- If you want to email me...Don't
So what ? You will be able to look at ita nd possibly learn (yes .. there are some things that NT does much better than Unix)
Again, this is exactly what Apple did back when I was in elementry school. They would put Macs for free or for a really low price in schools, so that the parents would buy a Mac for their kid when they bought a computer.
Here at rpi, the DHCP servers were just switched to NT. Consequence? When I actually get assaigned an IP address, I feel fortunate. But why did they change them? Well, apparently MS cut a deal with the school -- cheap office and windows licenses if we use NT server. Good lord!
I just hope they keep the web servers on AIX.
See you, space cowboy...
Right. Now, I don't profess to know Mr. Gates personally, but I doubt you've got the right impression of him. I'm given to understand that he likes to win, not mess with computers.
About spending the entire day thinking up ways for technology to advance, well, I don't think he does that either. Instead, I'd think that he watches others for good ideas, processes those, and adds to them or changes things a bit until he can use them. What kind of ideas? Ideas that will make his company, Microsoft, larger and more powerful, and win him more fame and fortune.
My feeling is that anybody who has a genuine interest in technology- or, for that matter, any field- would not push a shoddy product as top-of-the-line.
That takes a lot of work. It took Linux 8 years to become as popular, feature-rich, and useable as it has, and I think Linus & Co. have had a few more resources than Microsoft- in terms of skilled, willing programmers, not in terms of cash, etc.
Now, I don't doubt the part about "stealing" from Linux (it's what open source is good for, after all), but it will take some time to build a stable, full-featured operating system from the ground up. More likely, Microsoft will keep building on what they've got- NT & DOS. When was the last time either of those was scrapped and re-written from scratch?
Uh-huh. Sure he (they) will. Don't forget, Microsoft makes money off support, as well. If they rolled out a product that worked perfectly off the shelf, was intuitive to use, and required little effort to work in a cross-platform environment, then they wouldn't have to offer support.
If I were in charge of a corporation whose goal was more to make money than to advance culture and knowledge, then I'd not be putting R&D into vapourware, I'd instead stay with what works- offering products that are "good enough" for most people, play on my "familiarity" (after all, everyone uses Microsoft!), and last, but not least, strike deals where I can to increase my exposure to people who are still learning their preferences.
Of course, both of these comments are off-topic... weren't we suposed to be discussing MS putting itself into universities?
-Matthead
I goto a community college.. Cerritos Community College, and MS gave the college $500,000 to train the staff for MCSE and related certs.. its they're goal to make CCC a Microsoft Certified Training Center, Hows That? furthermore.. they are thinking of re-embersing the cost for the MCSE tests if you pass and attend CCC.. kinda sad bad IMO.. :( Im doing all I can to promote free software using Linux and some FreeBSD here but it gets pretty lonely.. Ohh well :(
or was that the joke?
I am a CS student at the California Institute of Technology, and earlier this year, I was informed of a deal where any student could recieve a copy of MS NT4 with lastest service pack, and MS Visual Studio 6.0 for the price of signing a paper saying your computer was capable of running it. I couldn't pass up the "free" stuff, so I got 'em. I still haven't installed NT. And I don't do any REAL work on VS6.0. I'm not alone in doing so. CIT is still strongly *nix based.
Our computer labs are mostly NT, as well. However, virtually every server on campus runs Solaris. We've got one Linux file server in an engineering lab, where we triple boot workstations between DOS, NT, and RedHat. We're the only lab that does this, although I believe one of the CIS (Computing & Information Science) labs is considering moving to dual-boot Linux & NT. We do have a couple labs of Sun terminals, but they're never used by underclassmen.
What I find really amusing is that one of my professors uses Windows on his Laptop, but in class, when he hooks it up to the projector, he starts an X-Server and runs everything he needs for class off the UNIX servers!
-Matthead
....aaaarggghhh.
But is is basically free....
Nuff said
Yup... getting around the reboot-on-kernel-upgrade thing's quite difficult (though folks have tried). However, because the linux kernel (and unix kernels in general) is far smaller in expanse than the NT/W2K kernel, there are fewer things to which revisions will require reboots.
A great number of security fixes, however, affect only the server software or standard C library; In these, no reboot is needed for a Unix. As for NT... yes, W2K can handle a service restart gracefully (and don't tell me NT 4 always can; It's less than perfect here)... but the C library? I think not.
This issue really ought to be brought before congress.
i dunno about that. Congress seems to listen to people with money and, well, free software just doesn't generate as much.
+&x
At my college the sentiment is quite anti-linux in computer services. Lately, through discussion, I have learned that this is mostly because the administrators admit they know little or nothing about linux/unix.
As far as students, particularily non-computer-literate types, using Linux, I see that beginning to change. Your comment about most people not being able or willing to setup a computer running linux is quite true. And as you state, the fact that windows comes pre-installed is why they can even use that. However, I don't think that is a reason to wait for computers to come pre-installed with Linux before they will use them.
As the leader of the Linux movement on campus, I see our purpose very clearly: provide support and guidance so that people are able to use Linux without having to be computer-literate. Yes, we also deal with the nitty-gritty of Linux, learning the details.
My goal in the next 2 years is to have an equal number of students on campus running Linux as are running Windows. And I feel that those Linux users should be spread evenly across all levels of students.
Luke, St. Norbert College, WI.
Also, while reading the responses so far, I get the impression that the importance of OS kernel stuff for CS students is being overrated here. OS courses are important to CS students, but there are many other aspects to CS that are just as important in real life. Just look at where CS graduates end up in real life: How many end up doing OS (or OS-level) development and how many end up in application development?
Its sad, but the CS department I'm refering used to be a UNIX house, while nowadays they seem to be mostly using M$ in their courses as well as for their internal workings.
The reasons are easy to see: M$ is what a considerable section of the industry asks for, and while teachings specific practical skills is not their main focus, why should they not have the students use the stuff that they will most likely have to use later on anyway? It used to be UNIX, but it now seems to be M$. Also, M$ actually is the cheaper platform if they want to expose their students to Object Modelling products such as Rational Rose et al. (I've seen the Rational Rose UNIX vs. NT pricing differences first hand.)
By the way, one of the better known Linux kernel guys works at said department, but that makes not much of a difference.
--
Linux user since early January 1992.
So what ? You will be able to look at ita nd possibly learn (yes .. there are some things that NT does much better than Unix)
Nope. You will be unable to make any software based on anything in that source without giving it back to MS. And you will be under constant threat to be sued for anything if MS will think that it's derived from their source.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
VC++ is not true C++ ?? ./ correct ) here, you know ...
Are you fucking nuts ? You don't have to be so politically correct (read :
If I could I would much rather use VC++ on Linux than egcs - it is simply better on X86.
As for Java, hehe. MS Java used to be fastest and most reliable around - recently I have lost track of it but I assume it haven't changed that much.
No, it woudn't. Look at the industry, if somebody codes for Windows 80 % of time his tool is VC++.
Knowledge of this product is expected !
Well there's another thing that scares me:
We have here in germany 'Agrar Informatik' (computer science & agriculture) and
this publication does allow only Word-documents
so it's rather difficult with UN!X/Linux/*BSD to
do research!
Ciao,
Frank
While Apple is a strong canidate to help keep MS on their toes, IBM nad SUN are better examples.
..., that it becomes more attractive to make a deal with the devil.
But, MS has the advantage if universities are looking for a complete solution... just like many coroporations have. It is just too much work for cash-strapped organizations to think about buying MS Office, WinNT, Exchange,
But, you can't argue the strategy... it is what made apple successful 15 years ago.
Time will tell...
Wolfenstein 3D was also a single-player game, with no network support.
While Apple is a strong canidate to help keep MS on their toes, IBM nad SUN are better examples.
..., that it becomes more attractive to make a deal with the devil.
But, MS has the advantage if universities are looking for a complete solution... just like many coroporations have. It is just too much work for cash-strapped organizations to think about buying MS Office, WinNT, Exchange,
But, you can't argue the strategy... it is what made apple successful 15 years ago.
Time will tell...
And what would you recommend for that "person" to use instead of Word ?
While MS maybe locking themselves out of some universities due to bad licensing policies, that may not change much on the Linux front. I don't believe that the success of Linux depends on holding onto the university enviroment for continued growth. There may be enough push in the commerical area that Linux development may continue to snowball even if the entire edu domain where complettely removed from involvement. MS has money and "produce value" to throw around but I would be suprised if they are able to use that to pass-up the number of developer hours that are now being put into Linux. Taking into account how global Linux development has become, I think it is reasonable to say that "the sun never sets on Linux development." Is some deals with some colleges/universities going to change that? I seriously doubt it.
Of course, all the other computer pods around campus are 90% NT 10% Mac. The non-techies are learning on M$ products. Teachers now stress M$ Office use in order to get A's. This cannot be left unanswered. Somehow, the OSS communities need to not just put together the best products, but we must also put together the best support. (IRC chat rooms/newsgroups are not publicized enough.)
It must be made 100% clear to School Administrators (who normally don't know crap about technology) that OSS routes will be the best and cheapest ways to go. It must be known to them that if there is a glitch, it will be painless to fix. The fact is, we can complain about M$ FUD all we want. However, the unfortunate side is that we continually do nothing about it but complain to all the other Techies out there that already know it is bullshit.
My first day back on campus this semester I opened my mail box and what do I find inside? . . . A copy of Office 2000 Professional and a nice note about how the University through a deal with M$ was giving all the students a copy of Office 2000 as well as making the Visual Studio product line and NT Workstation available for loan from the computing labs.
ironically i remember thinking macOS sucked as a third-grader when we used it at school to program BASIC -- i liked dos and commodores much better!
-- your knees hurt, don't they?
Same here at Purdue West Lafayette. Physics department use Linux a lot. CS started to teach VJ++. MS donated an entire lab of LCD screened computers... etc. but the main servers are still Solaris. I TA'ed for the first ever OO programming class that permits the use of VC++ and started to wonder how these MS raised students will ever pass OS course. (but i have never seen anyone clicking windows so swiftly in my entire life!)
The cool thing is, windows users have to wait for up to half an hour in line to get on a campus machine during busy hour just to check thier email with thier little netscape client. Unix users can do that anywhere and don't have to wait. if they do, five minutes top. Call that intelligence premium if you will.
Which reminds me. Fellow unix people, we are still in the dark era; god knows when or whether will this evil age be over.
Now, if the MIT grad students are gona be forced to do MS+Java, do you still think we respect this school like we did? i don't know.
I can't wait until large countries like Mexico come out of their linux gestation period. The universities and schools in America that signed their souls to NT are going to be caught in a pretty tough predicament. Reminds me of the 1980's "threat" of Japanese cars to the American guzzling tanks.
Then again, the world IS pretty big. The future is not under the control of either Microsoft or the open source community. The question that remains is: is everybody lining up and choosing sides for a grand confrontation? I don't like seeing conflicts becoming necessary.
Microsoft is playing chess fairly well--if they're going for an OS stalemate. My guess is that the stalemate is actually the best strategy for all sides. It is too bad that everything hinges on it so precariously.
The thing I'm most worried about is the pervasive dependency on Microsoft--telephones, television, servers, clients, information. They may never dominate in every realm, but playing a significant part in every realm could nevertheless ensure their great influence is felt everywhere.
It has been explained to me that, in the past (and perhaps still), IBM has generally been number two (in some categories) in each individual European country. The moral of the story is that in europe combined, it is, by far, number one. (I knew there was some reason I liked IBM even though I rarely ever use one.)
Microsoft may dominate using the same strategy, but to much greater consequence as we become more addicted to services they participate in providing. I hope that the trial reduces this threat a bit. The open source community is more or less a system that keeps itself in check. Corporations are often too quick to find suboptimal short term advantages. If this suboptimality persists, an even more precarious condition results.
Great precariousness may only be checked using great force and conflict. Fantastic images of coding warriors and SYN flood attacks are percolating in my head . . . .
Aiya! Think globally. Act locally. It minimizes the precariousness.
ahh the lovely qoute from Bill Gates when Steve Jobs said his mac was better. The point is that universities are having more and more cuts form the government while tuition rises more and more and a company offers you a free OS that is the defacto standard in the bussiness world.
Now as a dean, you are thinking of which OS to buy and standardize to save money. Would you buy the defacto standard int eh bussiness world and get windows for almost free on every client or use an outdated unix like system and pay royality fees on each client at your university and be forced to raise tuition?
IT makes alot of sense now doesn't it. Universities like mine at CUNY were told by microsoft that the whole school needs to standardise on one company. That comapny is us. Every single computer on all off the universities in all of NYC's boroughs have windows on them! I am stuck with it weither I liek it or not. I aksed my instructor and he told me that microsoft even controlls the text books at our school. It turns out that Microsoft has deals with the text book companies to teach proprietary code only for windows.
THAT is fucking scary!
I envy you all for using unix. I sure wish I could use it but since cuny owns every college in New York city, I have nowhere to learn it.
I wish microsoft would just shrivel up and die.
So... MS is giving NT Source Code to some Universities? Sounds like a move towards open source, and peer review. And here you are bitching about it! Can't you people decide what you want?
Have you seen, what license comes with that source?
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
one of the tricky things that m$ is proposing here is the "free" use of it's software. or almost free. "because it's so easy to use, you won't need all those students running it, blah blah."
if this succedes, i can see how M$ would love that. "ok, no more free. it'll be $X this year" and the U's won't have a choice, because no one will know anything but M$.
if it succedes...
(i prob misspelt many words.)
*elevator music plays*
I have to agree with this. I have a mixed network of 9x/NT machines and various Unix systems. The Unix systems take less work and are much more reliable. Yet every survey you see in the press always claim NT lowers the cost of ownership compared to Unix. What is wrong with their admins that they make Unix cost so much to look after ? Its always the NT machines that have the weird hard to fix problems. As an example, on Unix I install an app once in /usr/local and it gets distributed around the building (combination of rdist, NFS or the cachefs system on Solaris). On a PC you have install the app individually on each machine. And don't even talk to me about SMS. Have you seen the price of that thing ? Plus you have to buy SQL server (go figure). I get this functionallity for free on Unix.
As at MIT, there are no production Windows NT Servers in the Gates building.
Well, to be fair, that's because at MIT there is not yet a Gates building. Currently the new Stata Center (of which the Gates building will be a part) is a large hole in the ground.
--Seen
"I used to be a dilettante. Then I thought I'd try something else for a while."
This isn't new. At my university, Microsoft donated several workstations loaded with the latest wizz-bang hardware and Windows NT with all the development tools to the Computer Science department. They were placed in the lab next to our current Linux, Solaris and Mac machines.
:>).
The NT boxes never got touched, except to check email once in a while.
So, some enterprising students (or staff?) installed Omni-X on there, and people started using them -- as overpriced Xterms. All that computing power going to waste (or to Distributed.net...
The choice is there, is presented to the students, and both the students and most adminstrators have made their decision... Microsoft is unnecessary. And it will be even less necessary as these developers-to-be move into the workplace. And Microsoft can't do anything about it. It's all too little, too late.
-Chris
Software isn't really the big cost. If you compare $100 for windows with the salary of a tech support person it almost doesn't matter.
There needs to be objective studies on the cost of tech support for Linux versus Windows. These studies could probably get government funding if anyone is intersted in conducting them.
-- Virtual Windows Project
I know that Jay Sulzberger of LXNY thinks that having Gates and Microsoft get tax deductions for donations to schools tied with restrictive clauses is grounds for a lawsuit.
You never know with Jay how to take what he says, he is serious but he is not known as...put it this way...the most calm and rational individual in the world. OTOH he is pretty intelligent and does generally know his stuff.
Cheers,
Ben Tilly
My usual seat in the cluetrain is at A HREF="http://pub4.ezboard.com/biwethey.ht
That's somewhat scary. I grew up next to the main campus, and I'm glad now that I didn't go to school there :-/
(on the other hand, we'll see whether the students can remain sober for long enough to notice the change, especially given that the football season is starting right about now..)
Daniel
Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!
That was completely pointless. You'd think after not posting anything for a long while you could think of something better to do than troll around in the most unlikely of places.
~ Kish
A lot of people who use GNU/Linux and other GPL'ed stuff do so because of the licensing. Others could really care less and would use one of the BSD derivatives instead. And I kind of doubt anyone would use BSD. NetBSD, FreeBSD, or OpenBSD, perhaps.. Saying they'd be using BSD is sort of like saying they'd be using the orignal UNIX. That is, sort of unlikely. At any rate, who the hell cares? I was asking for the answer to a question, not a plug for your favorite OS.
Sometimes I don't have to wonder why a lot of people think *BSD users are snobbish and like to argue for no reason..
Besides which, I clearly said we'd "have" GNU/Hurd, not that we'd be /using/ it. Gah.
~ Kish
A link to a source either confirming or disproving the notion that Linus said the official name is GNU/Linux would prove quite.. useful. People can say what they "think" until they are blue in the face, but I, for one, want to /know/. If anyone can help me out with this, feel free to email me. :)
~ Kish
VC++ is a software package. And this packages "supports" true c++. However, it encourages the use of bad programming. It throws around macros isanely, (MFC)has a class hierarchy that is less sloppier than any other gui api I have ever used, and lacks well thought out encapsulation(they just smack on things as they need them). If I am unfortunate enough to have to build a project for a win32 environment, I would much rather use OWL. Also, VC++'s "visual" gui build environment is virtually useless without resource scripts to describe the layout(lack of encapsualtion). This making the environment itself not true c++. This .rc file also makes VJ non portable and thus not true java. Why use an environment that screws up your code so that it is a major pain to port to another compiler environment/OS.
I think that is a bit off. From what I have seen there are alot more VB people out there than VC++.
On the surface, moves by Apple in the 80s and MS now may seem similar. The difference would be that Macintosh's, having been a second class computer in terms of quantity since their introduction, have nearly always been able to integrate well with existing systems, such as UNIX systems, WinNT, etc. Although apple sells a file server package and, now, a server OS, one should keep in mind that Appleshare is in no way the only way to integrate Macs effectively and the MACOS Server provides much of the same functionality as any other UNIX derivative.
Sure, Apple might encourage schools to adopt MacOS server, but the promotional literature that I've seen from the company stresses the ease of using their computers with a variety of other systems. Here at dartmouth, for example, the majority of students use macs, the administrative network is VAX-based, and student-level servers are mostly UNIX (irix and aix). Our email is run on UNIX boxes as well (DEC, AIX).
By making a reasonable effort here to ensure that all network services follow standards, etc, Dartmouth has made it easy for any client (mac, win, nix) and any server on the network to work together. And it does work pretty well.
--Andrew Grossman
grossdog@dartmouth.edu
What Apple did was different because they didn't have good (or even bad!) servers. So they try to say use Unix as server and Macs as clients. That didn't work, but is a different thing.
One thing in favor of Unix/Linux is that there are still a lot of Universities (especially outside the US) which Microsoft won't touch. And Linux will always be cheaper than MS Stuff.
the use of the phrase "one's elders" has the connotation that linux is a copy of some ancient OS, while Windows is a new technology.
Fueling, ever slightly, the common person's idea that Bill Gates is some genius, and his software company is successful solely because of breathtaking innovation, which nobody else (especially an informal group of hackers) can match.
Fair enough, if all you`re interested in is Linux. If you`re concerned about UNIX as a whole, however, it is somewhat disturbing. And to see everything solely in terms of how it affects the status of Linux is to suffer from excessive tunnel-vision. I know it`s a dangerous thing to say in a place like this, but Linux isn`t the only thing that`s important!
Besides, one point the article made that isn`t addressed in your comment is the idea of the culture of UNIX, which is, after all, what gave rise to Linux, and which still does tend to live in academia. It is introduction to this culture (often as an undergraduate at a university) that gets people into ideas like open-source in the first place, and it is this culture that is beig threatened by the Microsoft moves.
Balderdash. One of the key functions of a real university is to provide a forum for diverse opinions aka academic freedom. "The University is the Watchdog of Society" This is why we have the tenure system, for example. Without these sort of freedoms society as a whole becomes endangered from 'mob rule' and being perverted into a totally consumeristic way of life. When University administrators start cutting deals for specific teaching tools at the behest of commercial interests our society as a whole is in danger. Unfortunately in publicly funded universities this is often a real problem. What is REALLY alarming to me is that we see similar trends in secondary and primary schools; for example companies providing free visual aids in exchange for the school requiring the students to watch commercials for the companies goods and services. The is Very Very bad stuff.
I am really sickened by latter day 'free market' advocates that seem to have forgotten the history of the free market in the US. The free market brought us the Pinkerton's assassination of union organizers, the Triangle Shirt Waist Fire, J. P. Morgan trying to face down the President of the United States (thank God it was TR) on the imposition of controls on large scale monopolies, Upton Sinclair's expose of food adulteration, a variety of environmental disasters, Company Towns, you name it. The fact of the matter is that Free Enterprise has been tried in this country and it Just Does Not Work for the simple reason that what is good for a company is not necessarily always good for the society as a whole. If you don't believe me, get any decent text on micro economics and look up the term "external diseconomy".
Balmer DID graduate from Harvard. Ballmer left Stanford prior to graduating when Gates hired him.
Ummm, why is this one marked with a Troll if they're right?
The previous post was completely unfounded
Time and time again I see people on this site responding to headlines without ever reading the articles.
Well it's a good thing to know that people can write (barely mind you but they can). Now if they can just learn to read maybe
they'll be able to think for themselves and not blindly follow the FUD spewed by those on the Linux side
This doesn't mean I'm a Microsoft evangelist. I'm just really sick and tired of reading all of the
gripes about Microsoft spreading FUD when quite a few of the non-Microsoft people on here constantly
spread FUD about Microsoft. I'm sorry, I'm not a firm believer in fighting fire with fire.
Personally, I think certain people should just grow up and enjoy themselves with whatever OS makes them happy.
Then again I'm just an AC so what do I know.
I must say that I agree with this post - why not, in a very competitive IT industry (globally) be multiskilled, whether we like it or not it is the way of the future.
A lot of people still in training - even at the higher tertiary level - just don't realize just what a diverse range of systems they are going to encounter in the "real" world. Real Managers, (generally not IT literate) just want things to work, period! They don't care about the minutae of every bit of HW and SW, and they don't like any change - especially radical.
They want to keep using the crappy email proggy they are used to, or the only dodgy word processor that they can handle. And it doesn't matter that we see these people as technically inept, they have the seniority in most organizations and are effectively your boss!
If it makes anyone feel better I have a fried that was working at IU when they made the deal with Microsoft. According to him Microsoft probably lost money on the deal. IU distributed so many copies of Microsoft software that Microsoft started to think they got taken in the deal. Since then I believe they have changed the rules on how colleges can actually distibute the software.(i.e. not on CDROM)
Overly worried or not... truthful or not Microsoft is not on top because of the quality of they're products at a competitive level, nor... any valid thing pretty much hehe, whats got up there is the ruthless, witty, smart moves they take, give stuff free, standarize office solutions, preinstalled crap, steal ideas, u name it they did it. and this is another smart move... i have to accept that. as for me i hae no influenze over that... im just another viewer ill sit and see what happends
----====___SUBLIME___OR___NOTHING___====----
I don't doubt for a moment that Rand herself would have been Anti-Microsoft, on the grounds that they're not trying to compete by honestly selling the best products, but on the basis that they're the biggest bully. Just like Henry Reardon's competitors in Atlas Shrugged, they tried to shut down Reardon by a variety of devious means, rather than by making a better metal.
"Real" capitalism -- as opposed the the pseudo-fascist corporate statism passed off as capitalism today -- is a friend of the worker. It maintains that no one has a right to a man, his ideas or his labor, except for the man himself.
Unions and collective baragining are a part of keeping everyone free. Think of various corporat activities in the context on the following quote (from capitalism.org):
When Microsoft takes punitive actions against a hardware manufacturer for not towing the company line, is it competing fairly? Or is it threatening the well-being of that company to achieve its own goals -- i.e., is it engaging in the initiation of force?
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
So yes, it will work... then it will be a matter of internal politics to get it situation fixed, and depending on how deeply the hook is set before they try to start reeling in it may actually do some serious long term harm. But I predict there will be some havens of *nix scattered around and that this will only make them stronger, as more good people get forced out of the schools micros~1 takes over.
Hrm..I wonder if the same situation applies at the South Bend campus of IU, which I'll probably start attending some time next year. I had heard a while back that there were more than a few Linux/*nix servers at IUSB, but I've not yet seen for m'self..I'd hate to end up in a mostly microsoft environment just because I waited for a bit to go back to school..
"Fundamentalist forces are undermining the integrity of liberal and democratic political structures."
My schools IS department used to be run by the students and because of their laziness the admistration decided to hire consultants. The consultants decided to revamp the whole system to a Win NT system. The way I look at it NT is like a virus. At first we had 100% unix (solaris), next a couple of NT boxen made there way in. Then before you know it there was 99% NT.
Although, there is a Linux server running samba to manage the NT networks. We even lost access to shell accounts. Sorry to say but students need to pirate stuff to get there CS homework done. Yesterday I was doing an EE project and a floored my friend when I logged in to my Linux box in my dorm, wrote a truth table program for (A NAND based Data Latch) in 5 minutes over telnet. He was so suprised because Microsoft site license restrictions prevent the computers we were using to use VC++ in the lab we were in. With UNIX/LINUX use telnet, login, get work done, and its all good.
To make a long story longer, if we do not expose people to the LINUX/UNIX enviornment when they are studying become professional engineers/scientists they may never see it and it may cause them to fear it. Projects that would cost almost nothing on a free OS may be too expensive for people in a Microsoft environment increasing the barrier of entry for young engineers/scientists. If you are concerned about you school becoming more and more, Microsoft like GET INVOLVED before it is too late. Trust me there are others who feel the same way.
On a positive note I hear there are plans for an underground LINUX/UNIX movement for students to get access to shell accounts. Free software will never die!!!
Engineering students at Waterloo are not so fortunate -- CAD of various sorts is the only major use of computers, and it's taught on Windows. There is access to a very minimal UNIX server, but there are no CAD programs (as far as I can tell), and Netscape is not installed (and too big to fit in disk quota), so I end up using Mosaic, or telnetting to my Linux box.
The CS students use UNIX, so they like it, and Polaris is so bad (mostly because it's trying to integrate with Windows) that all students hate it. Only if this changes will there be a problem.
- we are talking about _STATE_ schools. _State_ schools shouldn't get government support?
- if you think prevalence of Unix constitutes 'monopolistic practices' you're seriously out of your mind. One fellow did a study and learned that out of five commercial Unices NO TWO were compatible for nontrivial programs. Unix is, and has always been, so fragmented as to be _shattered_, and this is both its weakness and its greatest strength. Linux merely accelerates this process, and will stay fluid as long as Red Hat doesn't get too dominant.
- The people will decide, and Microsoft is still cheating. Regrettably, everybody does _not_ think as you do- your great failure is that your thought does not take into consideration the reality of a heterogenous society.
If everyone _did_ act as a proper Randite, you'd be right. That doesn't happen- you guys are so far off in right field that getting Joe Average to buy what you're selling is really very comparable to getting Joe Average to learn to write a Makefile from scratch. He's gonna go, "Well, I dunno..." and you lose.This is made obvious by your very emotional reaction to the GPL (btw, in the interests of fairness, note that I have released software more than once under the GPL, though I copyrighted it to myself- I'm more concerned with disseminating my ideas than I am with legal recourse through the FSF in case somebody hijacks them). The normal person has no such hatred and fear of the GPL- if anything, it might be thought of as nice and rather naive, a sort of harmless liberal-commie thing people do, like Greenpeace. There will be people who are already fiercely dedicated to collective action who would instantly understand and support the GPL- for instance, explain it to any union by saying "this is how we develop collective strength, only with this anyone who gives their software to our society also gets to keep it themselves and doesn't 'lose' it". They'll think it's terrific, they'll support it.
Naturally, there will also be people like you who flip out- and that's okay- we don't need _everybody_, cooperation is self-sustaining.
I think that's the key problem here: your concept can't live in a heterogenous environment. If your world was real, Linux would never have started in the first place... the Randite belief system can only survive in a plastic bubble protected against nasty cooperators and socialists. (net-pseudo-Randite? Note I'm not saying 'libertarian' as I've seen libertarians _pissed_ at Microsoft for _breaking_ the functioning of the free market. That, I can understand)
This is because cooperation and socialism and collective effort is far more damaging to the Randite world than Randites are to our current, heterogenous world. You see the problem- if everybody _has_ to fight alone for greed and victory, it's even, but what if people cheat? The GPL is cheating this- it's letting people pool their efforts and achieve more than you could have by yourself. People deciding that they want to 'benefit society' and actually donating their effort, time and work to such projects are even worse, because that effort isn't accounted for in the Randite world at all! It's not supposed to happen. If it does, there's a very good chance that such cooperation can produce an advantage over the Randite way (see Linux as an example- not dead yet is it? See the Red Hat IPO), and you have no defense against this because _your_ ethic prohibits socialism efforts for the common good- therefore anyone agreeing with you will refuse to help you in any way unless they can get an advantage over you by so doing.
Your only option is attack (as you are, indeed, doing), because in order for your Randite world to give you a fair chance at winning, other people need to not cheat. They need to not collude in collective action, they need to not gang together in large numbers and donate 90% of their effort in order to waste some of it, but come up with a cooperatively built monster that'll have you for lunch, that is beyond anything your selfish little efforts can produce.
In order for your Randite world to work, people have to be stopped from doing that. It gets in the way.
By comparison, you can run around being as selfish (and I mean that in the Rand way) as you like, and it doesn't make a bit of difference to me or the people I share GPLed code with. I am happy when I put out code under the GPL. I know other people are, too, when they do it. There might be a time when I need to take big chunks of code from something out there and build a new thing- with the GPL, not only is the code out there, but it costs me nothing because I'm part of the same culture, the same society.
You can even fight as hard as you like to convince everybody in the world that they _shouldn't_ cooperate with me. Be my guest. The trick is, the world is heterogenous. It's much, much harder for _you_ to stop everybody in the world from GPLing than it is for me to find a few other people GPLing and cooperate with them. If you can't stop everybody, then your whole ethic is ruined- those people will collude and _will_ produce a risk that they can beat you simply by being willing to 'undersell' you- because they are donating effort, forming a cooperative society, and it's cheaper to go with them, you lose. They 'take a loss' in passing up chances to hock their work at market rates, in order to participate in the society where 'market rates' no longer look particularly appealing- doesn't 'free beer' sound like a promising offer? And 'free speech' comes in when you realise that you're dealing with very technical stuff- that a 'Randite' guy could easily have you in a hammerlock and extort anything they like from you by building in boobytraps in their products and getting you dependent on their stuff- but if you go with the GPL stuff, the whole culture and concept makes it pretty ludicrous to do that sort of thing, as all the information is out there to be audited... yet another way in which the Randite way is a poor competitor... you have to take an extra effort to con people into _trusting_ you while at the same time you pointedly disclaim trust and consider 'caveat emptor' the best and only advice. On the one hand you put all responsibility on the buyer (claiming grandly that the buyer has Deity-like judgemental powers and can't be conned, trapped or tricked), and then you still have to get 'em to trust you...
Well, cooperation will just have to go on without you. It will, you know: the world is heterogenous. Since the existence of cooperation and collusion is poison to the pure Randite approach, and since (the world being heterogenous) there's always going to be lots of cooperation, doesn't that tend to suggest that your 'power of pure freedom' is a Microsoft-like vaporware promise, and that believing in you and doing things your way will prove to be a substantial handicap?
Join us... or continue on, always slightly handicapped, starving in the midst of plenty due to your own stubborn pride. Personally, I'd be delighted for you to get your head straight and start thinking cooperatively, but I have no problem sharing a world with you if you don't. You pose no threat to me.
I'm sorry we GPL hordes pose a threat to you, but you knew you might lose the game when you set out to win it, didn't you?
I'm an EECS student at Berkeley, and yes - I've seen more and more classes being taught using NT. The way I hear that it works (correct me if I'm wrong) is that we get nice new donated computers from Intel which are supposedly only supposed to run NT and only be used for certain courses (dictated by Intel) while our undergrad Unix labs still have old Pentium Pros running Solaris x86. Even our file servers and mail servers in the EECS dept. are still (I think - correct me if I'm wrong) old Sparcstations that could easily be replaced by one machine from the NT graphics lab running FreeBSD or Linux.
Anyone from Cal care to enlighten us why we keep seeing new NT machines (i.e., CS 184 lab, CS 150/152 labs) but not a single new Unix machine as long as I've been a student here?
And why they're switching core CS classes (like CS 61C) to being taught with NT instead of Unix?
It makes me sick.
The sad part of the whole IU deal with M$ was that there are still parts of the deal that haven't been made public to the students. One of the things I've heard was the major reason of the deal was that M$ was about to sue IU because their students all pirated M$ products for bout 10x what the deal was. IU in their infinate wisdom supposedly settled by paying for the site license. Now this is all rumor, but we've all heard it at IU. I don't know if its the truth or just anti-M$ sentiment. All I know is that my boss won't buy me another mac because the higher authorities won't allow for it now that we are a M$ school. I don't mind using NT, but I hate the fact that I'm forced into it. I don't like the fact that NT and Win2k obsolete my machines in no time flat and I have to get rid of my perfectly legitimate 486 novell file server as we no longer can get a decent deal on the upgrades...oh well it just means that will be a linux server too as its way too slow for NT (or 98 for that matter).
blah...thinking I should have logged in as an AC even though this is clearly marked as rumor and inuendo and hearsay. I don't know nor do I claim to know, just reporting what I've heard.
clif
Mgr Development
IUPUI Testing
is not that they don't want to... is that if you want to hire a respectable Unix -teacher-programmer, is double the $$$ than a Windoze one... why?? probably cause the second option... mr.doze is... (15 minutes looking for the right thesaurus word) crappier? ;)
----====___SUBLIME___OR___NOTHING___====----
It is kind of frightening but this is *exactly* what is going on.. I am posting this anonymously but I am moving to a school where they pretty much bought the computing resources for the department provided that they all run NT clusters (MPI etc) so all the code at this group is now all NT based. (most likely relatively portable but..) They also did the same thing here (this was a large Intel/Microsoft grant) We got an obscene amount of that package, in practical terms we got a shitload of 4 processor Xeon boxes running NT. We took the machines and reformatted the drives to Solaris :). To be honest there is one kid who left a few dual processor boxes running NT which he messes w/, but the rest of need our unix (we use dqs for distributed loads etc). I don't know what to think about learning NT I suppose I shouldn't care; its *just* an OS. But remember all these kidz are cash starved and if someone says we are going to give you a million if you run NT, they are going to take the hardware no questions asked. And slightly more unfortunately some people don't wait until they look away and reformat ;). BTW I didn't go, but a few of us went to the Microsoft and Science Unix/NT migration and it was *such* a joke.. I think NT has (allegedly) decent compilers for it but I am not all together positive how easy it is to 'set stuff up' (setting up queues, running perl scripts to check machines, setting display??) but I suppose I am going to find out :! p.s. this is my ignorance of NT question how the fuck do you set the display so it send say microsoft outlook onto another machine (say ppp at home) from the machine at school? you know set DISPLAY=myhome:0.0?? -avi
now they're considering switching back to Unix, because they lost a lot of companies looking to hire grads... seems they don't want Windows programmers.
Ironically, the biggest impediment to going back to Unix is that a few of the faculty don't know Unix and don't want to learn.
Go figure.
yup. i installed mwave drivers on my nephews win95 computer yesterday and had to reboot THREE times. ug.
then it didn't work and all i had to configure it with was graphical dialog boxes that told me everything was fine. god i hate windows.
"you look like the gay version of a homo in a fag costume" - Greg_L
This article seems a little paranoid. Vendors have
:)
always courted Academic Institutions with
fantastic deals (like $850 Ultra 5's)and MS hasn't
done anything different latley. I remember sitting
and drooling at a NeXT Price list in 1992 seeing
that the sleek black boxes really werent out of
reach ($3100 for a monostation 8/105) These prices
were always very very very (absurdly?) low...
Why? To get the kids in school in love with a
product or vendor, and bring that youthful
evangalism to the workplace...
In fact, the first time that I had seen a DEC
Alpha (a 166 I think) it was running NT! (I
thought it was a waste and apparently, MS saw
things in a similar way). The facts are simple
UNIX, a programmers OS, will always be around
academic environments because it works best in
those surroundings. Unless MS decideds to make
a product that really works better than UNIX it
probably wont leave (in that case, if it really
did work better, I would probably use it and have
no problems).
ANYWAY I think the point is simply that we need
not fret about MS cutting rings around trees,
because the tools they have (windows, NT, Visual*,
even their "java" implementation) are not good
enough to do the job. If they were good enough, we
wouldnt be using Unices, now, would we?
And for the college students out there... check
out your campus bookstore or IS department...
They have proce lists form vendors, and you have
the *right* as a paying student to take advantage
of them.
relax, enjoy college... I diddnt and I am a lesser
man because of it (now I have to go back and take
slacker courses and pick away at a math degree
because I was too busy being a biochem student
to stop and smell the Mersenne primes)
There is plenty of time to be paranoid about
our beloved UN*X to be taken away when you are
in the work place, where MS really does have the
man by the short and curlies.
- A not-so-Anonymous johnny waters
johnny@NOSPAMmartnet.com
cut the NOSPAM out if you want to mail me..
Some people think going to university is all about the sex (cf: American Pie).
Not me. I'm at uni for the Unix. Sex was easy enough to find at high school, but not Unix. No, I was deprived.
When I started, there was a room of BBCs (*SAY THESE THINGS TALK?) and a room of Mac Classics. Soon enough we had a room of Wintels and thankfully (looking back on it), the Macs were upgraded too.
Currently sitting at a Win2K machine and a RH6 486, I'm thinking of how I was blinded, beaten and tortured by MS for all these years. I've set up various computer systems in the bookshops I've worked at... WinNT4 machines mostly, IIS, ASP and the rest. Sure, it was easy... but I didn't learn much. Certainly nothing out of the WinNT playpen.
If it weren't for university, I would never have seen a real OS (well, I did play with Linux back in the old thirty disk Slackware instal days, but mostly for the "ooh, it doesn't say C:\> !" kicks).
Ever. Until the last year, other operating systems have been just too easy to miss - or dismiss.
Convert me. Take of my sins and wash them from me. I wanna ba a Linux guru.
That's the sad part of writing replies,
when there's already 300+ comments.. but
I'll try anyway.
Don't you think people already know that more
OSes than Unix exist when they get into
college/university?
IMHO the main reasons Unix has been so popular in the educational system is not because of the
obvious speed/stability/usefullness issues, but
for two educational issues:
1. You have the option to learn something
else than Word/Visual c++ etc. You have the option
of learning an OS. You can actually teach people
the inner workings of an operating system with Unix. Why? You have the code available. You
actually may have some of the _people_ that wrote
that code at the university.
2. Creative freedom...you give the students something to be creative with, and tamper with.
Some of the students then create better code, which in turn may be added to the development tree.
How can Windows NT compare with this?
The univerities don't stay with Unix because
it's quality is low. They stay with it, because
they know Unix, and it actually creates the small
possibility of the students learning something
(gaaaawk, gasp).
Well, I am going to disclose that i was born in croatia. In the Zagreb Faculty of Electronics and Computer Science (a huge institution for that part of the world, about 30.000 students, maybe more) Solaris was king until just a couple of years ago. Then NT started to leak in, and now it's there, more and more, pushed by an invisible, evil force called money.
BTW, there is a computer magazine in the country where I was born which used to be a very nice publication, until, 4 years ago, M$ started "funding" some of the journalists. Suddenly NT became the NOS of choice, the NOS that "will win and bury all those UNIXOIDES." (BTW, the name of that magazine is BUG)
The thing that makes me even more sad is the thought the Zagreb Faculty and BUG were cheap targets compared to the US colleges.
%#@@£#& Microsoft (sorry for the flame)
Sigged!
Universities ought to be using Windows and teaching the skills that are most in demand (like VB), so as to produce marketable graduates.
There is a huge difference between education and training.
Training is showing someone how to use Word/Excel/Gnumerics/whatever.
Education is teaching someone how to think independently, solve problems and have an analytical mindset.
A trained person may or may not be able to work outside their training. An educated person can and will constantly learn new things and add to their skillset.
Personally, I don't think that you should come out of university 'trained'. You should have been exposed to lots of stuff: *nix, VMS, Win*, Mac and whatever weird things are lurking in the depts of the CS or Engineering depts. You should come out of university with the ability to sit down in front of something and figure it out damn quick.
dave - just my hkd 0.16
I go to UMBC (Unvc Md, Baltimore County)
I heard something about a MS software deal, but I haven't seen anything like it. On the otherhand, we now have our first Linux box in our Irix cluster!
The idea of a "Microsoft only" university, at least in the technical disciplines, reminds me of the occasional news stories about former students suing their schools for failure to provide the promised education.
Schools develop reputations based on the quality of the student they turn out. Likewise, development environments develop reputations based on the quality of the developer that they produce. Linux hasn't exactly been the easiest platform to work in (although it that is changing)... but it's been an excellent training ground for developers that can handle almost anything.
MS tools tend to produce developers that have glaring weaknesses. In my experience, a MS developer seems far less likely to consider possible failure modes and is far more likely to give up when confronted by difficulty. More than one, with handed a bug report, has shrugged his shoulders and said it's probably a OS error. Or a library error. Or a mismatched shared library. It's certainly not worth *his* time to investigate. Compare that to the average Linux/Unix programmer who generally accepts that the OS and libraries are probably correct and that the problem is his responsibility.
So what, we should judge everyone as an individual? I agree 100% -- unless you're talking about screening 300 resumes for a single slot. Toss out the non-starters and you have no more than than 20 resumes. Still too many to interview all of them, how do you decide who's worth bringing in for an interview? For better or worse, in any non-MS environment there's a strong predictor of problems: primary MS experience.
If that's a problem with people with general university educations but MS work experience, I don't want to think about what Micros~1 University will produce. And when I'm deciding who to bring in for an interview, or who gets the job offer, I won't. Once they're employed I'll worry about the individual, but until the offer is accepted I have to use the best predictors I have. A MS-U degree is definitely a predictor....
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
Nevertheless, there have been incidents like M$ attempt to get the German state Northrhine-Westfalia to exclusively use M$ software in schools (not universities, as far as I know). There is, however, heavy opposition.
Chilli
-=- Just a random lambda hacker
So let me get this straight, Micro$oft is giving out cash and free copies of Windows, right? Now, the free copies of windows thing is kind of pointless, if they're fighting free software the only way to make it cheaper is to pay people to use it. Which, is in effect, what they're doing.
Now bare with me, all they're doing is giving money to colleges. They can't FORCE the colleges to use windows and as for handing it out free to students, that's pretty silly. Most students would buy computerrs preloaded with windows, anyway.
I stopped $$ support when I learned they standardized on MS at my almamater. Every time they call or write for $$ I tell them that if the school can be that careless by choosing solutions (MS) needing constant replacement of software and hardware, that they don't need my $$. I then ask the person on the phone how many different versions of MS Word had he/she delt with so far at the school. They then understand. Money talks.
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
I worked on a project at UCLA that was microsoft sponsored, so I have a unique view into microsoft's world of academic sponsorship.
I'm a CS student at UCLA, now on leave to work fulltime, but during the last year and a half or so, I was working with one of the professors in the CS department and some other CS students to build a departmental infrastructure using ASP and SQL Server... We ended up getting sponsored by microsoft (they donated a few machines and more software than we could shake a stick at.)
While trying to get sponsored by microsoft, I got to talk a few times with their VP in charge of academic development (he works for microsoft research, the quasi-independant research side of MS). All of their academic programs are run through there, presumably to give them the stamp of independance. According to him, Microsoft's starting to get big in the university sponsorship area. Their plan is to have five "premiere" university partnerships (UCLA being one of them). I have no idea what the others are, but it sounds like indiana university is another one. Once they've created the premiere partner relationship, they start funding university projects, bringing down MS speakers to give talks (the talks usually revolve around presenting the latest microsoft products, surprisingly), and working their way into the system. I'm not sure what pressures UCLA faces to convert over to NT, but I know a *lot* of their systems use it. Microsoft also has a campus representative, a student who gets paid to run around promoting microsoft, coordinating presentations on site, and being the student side of the public face for microsoft.
On the plus side, the LUG at ucla is pretty darn active, www.linux.ucla.edu although they can always use more help. Aspiring college students, if you want a challenge, head on over to UCLA...
quite possibly the most perceptive comment in this discussion...
I just don't see something like this happening. Like the article says, "UNIX culture" is passed on to every new generation of students in universities. You can't help but pick up some of the history on your way through.
Now this could be replaced by NT / Win2000??
I just can't see it happening. Maybe something else one day.
It's a more complicated issue than just pressure from without from Microsoft. You can't hack as easily or experiment and play as easily on an NT system (like that even needed being said). Not that you inherently *can't* with NT. There are NT hacks and therefore hackers. But nothing compares to the decades-long traditions behind UNIX.
If anything, I think today's students may be *more* aware of the specialness of their "GNU inheritence" so to speak than a few years ago when it was perhaps taken for granted more.
[We don't come from a planet. We come from a grid sector.]
Computer Science departments, where a bunch of the industry's good minds come from, are a different story. Computing isn't just the means, it's also the end. There are far too many people at far too many universities doing far too much research that requires the use of operating system sources. (And by that I mean kernel source, not the sources for ls and grep.) Any CS department worth its salt will have at least one project like this going on at a time, and you can bet your bits they won't agree to using something for which there's no source license available.
When I was in college (mid-to-late '80s), we had source licenses for 4.{1,2,3}BSD for our VAXen and Suns and SVR3 for our AT&T 3Bx machines. I can think of a half-dozen or so research projects that went on during my four-year stay that were directly OS-related. One in particular involved attaching multiple Ethernet interfaces to a host and bonding them into one big, fast interface. Today that's no big deal -- I can slap a Quad Fast Ethernet card in a Sun, load up the software and (thoretically) get a 400 Mbit/sec hose for my trouble. But this was over a decade ago, when your choices for Ethernet were "thick" or "thin," there were still less than 10,000 hosts on the Internet and the sophisticated routing protocols that would do effective load balancing over multiple links were still a few years away. It was damned cool stuff for 1987.
The fact is that operating systems are excellent proving grounds for things in a number of CS research areas. It's very convenient to take a functioning system and transplant or graft a piece that proves a new concept. The Ethernet project I mentioned above and many others like it would never have made it off the ground had the researchers been required to develop enough software from scratch to make the thing run.
I have my own theory about why you'll never see Microsoft completely take over any decent CS department. Based on the bloat and overall quality of its past and current product lines, I envision the sources to be large, generally ugly, difficult to work with and even harder to compile without sacrificing a couple of small farm animals. Just for the sake of argument, let's say that Bill Gates is replaced by an alien who decrees that from now on the sources for Windows will be licensed just like the sources of BSD were -- free to academic institutions. Three things will happen:
My 2000 millicents' worth...
I read the article. Microsoft is giving away software to universities. So now your software's free but your support still isn't. I've adminned NT systems. It isn't pretty. I've also adminned UNIX systems. It's a hell of a lot easier, especially remotely. And the amount of admin work (at least) seems to be a lot less.
What are they doing, trading software dollars for the more lucrative support dollars? What university is going to fall for that?
NT can be relatively stable. I've got one doing PDC and Exchange and it hasn't been rebooted in months. However it isn't doing a whole hell of a lot, either. I also admin a half dozen Linux boxen. Similar uptimes, with the two main ones not having been touched in the better part of half a year. These boxes WORK. Tens of thousands of emails and web hits a month, a continuously growing database, serving up service for an ISP, etc... All I do is basically monitor logs and keep on top of anything that pops on to bugtraq and the like.
As far as client software goes, I regularly reinstall Windows boxen. The people here who have chosen to run Linux on their desktop I haven't touched. There is definately something to be said for an OS which doesn't let you do something stupid unless you're the superuser, while at the same time also allows you to get your work done without requiring you to be the superuser.
I really doubt universities are going to switch just 'cause the software's free. People don't like working on NT. It's pretty, sure, but unwieldy. Hard to keep everything down and working. And the slowness of fixing software problems, especially security problems, is well noted.
This tactic will likely ding the userbase of Linux, but not the important userbase. It'll attack the userbase that uses it because it's free, not becuase it works.
So the question remains: Microsoft's giving away some software. So?
College types don't need to know that sort of stuff anyhow. It just leads to cracking.
(This post is smiley-impaired for the humor impaired).
--The basis of all love is respect
here at NJIT, this year the incoming freshmen all got NT boxes because some students were supposed to be able to run some sort of CAD software. It's been a disaster. All the new (l)users tried installing incompatible hardware, changed some setting that cause BSODs, forgot passwords, and so they had to return them for maintenance over and over again. The one upside to this is that they got systems that weren't last year's piece of crap, so we finally have a lot of people who can play quake 2 (and beacuse of our tight-ass firewall that's all we can play against). Too bad my 2 year old school computer (a Cyrix 120) turned Linux Q2 server can't keep up with them all.
I'm very interested to see where linux is going in the future. We see lots of stories about M$ and others and there attempts to downplay or kill the linux movement. I don't think we need to be concerned about this as much as we are.
-- Moondog
...about a world where there is free choice, and the consumer reigns, but Microsoft and Bill Gates demonstrate what most cultures have known and documented throughout history:
1) Absolute power corrupts absolutely;
2) Money is the root of all evil.
I hope open/free software can make it, but the reality of the situation is bleak. This is the richest man in the world, in one of the most corrupt political/economic countries in history.
These facts will have a very tough time summing to freedom.
Myself? I think the evidence shows Microsoft is a criminal organization. Worse than ATT. Worse than IBM. Don't just break them up or monitor them.
Take away their right to sell product. Any product. In the name of National Security. Fed, state and local governments take away the right to do business of corrupt companies all the time.
Stop them now. Lacking this, I'm afraid the only hope for freedom is an "Open Source" John Brown. I normally abhor vilolence, but if such a man exists, I promise to send you cigarette money.
millions of free copies of windows that could have been sold for millinos more for a smaller cost of having NT installed? The amount of support and everything that has to go into this as a project costs more money than it will take in.
Its no longer a student discount to gain advantage and still make money, this is all about heaving your weight to knock your competitor down.
-
ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
Please, take the dirty socks out of my G4.
Here at the University of Michigan, a software deal with Microsoft was just announced. Their software will be offered to student and faculty at a deep discount, better than typical educational discounts -- something like 75% off the standard price. I haven't heard details about the deal yet. Is Microsoft being granted exclusivity in any area? Will Metrowerks Codewarrior be taken off the lab computers in favor of Microsoft Visual Studio?
Students Are Poor (duh)
This is a great strategy for getting to the academicians. Students make even more financially-limited decisions than their employed peers. For example, a local grocery store chain just switched from having lots of good weekly sale items (which made it popular with the students) to having a membership-card based discount. Now, to get the sale price, I have to let them link every purchase to my identity. Me and my intellectual schoolmates have moral objections to this new system, but $5 a week in savings is probably enough to make us fall in line. A few bucks is a good way to counteract the ideality common in ivory towers.
Role of $$$ in the Death of Amiga
Back in the glory days of Amiga, when Windows and Mac were slow and clunky (slower and clunkier?), Amiga had a nice, smooth, multitasking operating system. Plus, it cost less than a PC or Mac! When PC prices crashed, Amiga lost a major selling point.
What happens when you can pay $25 for Win2K vs. $80 for Red Hat Linux?
Death by Unforseen Cultural Shifts
I believe that the Internet played a major role in extinguishing the Amiga. As the Web and e-mail became mainstream around 1995, Internet software became the killer app. Development of Amiga browsers lagged far behind that on the PC due to smaller numbers of users and developers. Inadequate browsers (as well as home-office software) drove people away. As we grow comfortable with the not-quite-so-new Internet, I wonder what changes are coming in the next 5 years.
If students stop enrolling in CS courses, it's time to look at the market and observe how the courses aren't "useful"...
top-down decision making about these kinds of issues limits choice and impedes academic freedom.
Well, maybe the financial thing could kill off commercial Unixes, but Linux? So NT is free, so what, Linux is too. All the more reason to get Linux to enterprise strength as quickly as possible. From an educational perspective, an opensource OS makes a lot more sense, too.
Let us examine why.
;) Those students who are capable of contributing to a sophisticated open source project, an are motivated to do so, will do so regardless of what hell breaks loose at their school.
Firstly, the greatest falsehood in the essay is that it equates UNIX with Linux. Because Linux is a UNIX-like system, anything that affects the position of UNIX in the academic environment is also a threat to Linux. This is false; the real tension here is between open source free software and closed-source proprietary software. Both Windows NT and commercial UNIX fall into one camp when we view things this way. In the face of open source competition in the academic arena, not only Microsoft should be cutting deals, but so should vendors of proprietary UNIX.
Secondly, it is hard to believe that computer science and engineering academics could be persuaded to dump their True opreating systems (whatever those are) in favor of some garbage from Redmond. That is just not going to happen.
Another insinuated falsehood is that Linux has always been accepted in academic environments, and it was accepted purely because it is UNIX-like, and that it is very widely accepted by everyone in all computer science departments everywhere. Linux has flourished in the academic environments *in spite* of commercial UNIX variants. It was perhaps most used among undergraduates, at least initially. It was a long time before Linux made its way into departments, by sneaky routes not unlike those that it has taken in the corporate arena. Many old timer faculty members would scoff at Linux, being BSD freaks or commercial UNIX die-hards. It was (and *is*) hard enough to convince the academics that Linux is any good! Good luck trying to push NT on these people.
It's not like all of computer science went crazy over Linux overnight. Undergraduates flocked to Linux because it gave them a good development platform that was compatible with the systems at school.
This brings me to my final point. Yes, to some extent, Linux did become popular in the university environment among computer science and engineering undergraduates because it provided students with a familiar enviroment. Students could perform computing assignments and then easily back port them to the UNIX machines at school. So it would appear that if the school gradually converts to a non-UNIX operating system, this advantage of Linux will disappear. That much I can buy; what I have a problem with is the logic of the next inference: namely that Linux is somehow endangered by this! Truth is, the students who depend on Linux to provide a familiar homework environment are not particularly significant to the Linux movement. At least, not any more! Linux has a much broader base of users now. Secondly, such users do not contribute to Linux; they are usually very junior programmers. Many of them dump Linux when it is no longer needed for doing homework, in order to make room for Windows games on their hard drives.
In short, I do not buy the view that Linux requires broad, grass-roots support in academia everywhere in order to survive. For that matter, I don't think that it *ever* did require that support, nor did it have that support, and that it has flourished in spite of *opposition* in academic circles as well as corporate environments---the only difference being that there is less UNIX ignorance in academia, which is a two-edged sword (less UNIX ignorance == more UNIX arrogance). I also don't think that the operating systems choosen by computer science or engineering academics have all that much impact on the real world. Otherwise you would see a heck of a lot more UNIX everywhere and far less Windows. The academics, along with their UNIX boxes, could all disappear overnight and it wouldn't make a difference to the future of Linux, nor to the future of anything.
Remember all those AppleII's and Mac's that we had in school growing up? (Ok, I'll date myself, I had a TRS-80, but still)... Apple (Jobs) gave free computers to schools throughout the 80's - with exactly the same intention. Get them while their young, keep them when they grow up...
:)
Ironic, how Microsoft can't even 'innovate' a way of exploiting people, without ripping off Apple.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
What's more, the research computing systems at IU are almost entirely Unix based, and that is what determines what students are going to learn on. One thing that many people seem not to understand is that "Office of the VP for Information Technology" != "Computer Science Department". The CS department has zero control over the servers used to provide email to the students at large, and the OVPIT has zero control over the computer science curriculum. Even if OVPIT decided to go entirely MS (and at IU they insist that they have no plans to do so), the research computing systems would still be Unix based because that's what CS, Chemistry, Physics, and Astronomy want.
I think this is a non-issue. The students that MS is reaching were, for the most part, all Windows users anyhow. All this agreement does is get the state of Indiana to buy them software that they might otherwise have done without (or perhaps copied illegally). More money into MS's pocket? Sure, but hardly a ploy to take over the world. As for the non-Windows users, they will find a way to get what the need regardless of what MS does, same as always.
-r
Though Wintel won't soon be the exclusive platform here at MIT, there has been "cooperation" between faculty members (esp. Comp. Sci./EE) and the corporate hierarchy, including MS and Sun. The result is that many CS classes are using MS+Java as their development platform.
Fortunately, the role that the Internet has played in the development of Linux will probably continue, and students (like myself?) who appreciate the aesthetic and technical superiority of Linux (and other *nixes) will use the Internet to continue to push and advocate the technology.
Thankfully, physics groups are poor and love Unix in general -- all but one of the boxes in my research group are running Linux.
*** Proven iconoclast, aspiring bohemian. ***
As a college student myself I like to tinker
:)
with software (my computer currently boots QNX/BeOS/win 95osr2/nt4/Mandrake Linux)
and I like to program in VB and VC++ and VJ
its simple and easy(ya I know its not TRUE Java
or C++ but so what?)
and I just paid $99 for a copy of VB 6.0 that
came with NT 4.0 service pack 3.
COME ON thats a good deal... $250 worth of software for $99 and it comes with a $200 OS?
Personally I think MS giving away products is A good thing because it exposes people to their
software.. And with them now accepting cheap software.. you can entice them with more free
software from Linux.
Personally IF i had to choose ONE OS to live with.. I would choose Linux right now.. But
i cant live without NT or 95 or QNX or even BeOS.
And all you MS haters should love MS giving away software and not making money off it
As the kids play with M$ software, they'll break it. It will fail them.
The less savvy will lose and important homework assignment when the computer crashed because of error 89837:34975398. Their grade will go down, and they will remember.
The more savvy will break it on purpose. They will be trying to tweak the school network, to chat with a friend, to get into a teacher's account, and they'll succeed. They too will remember. And when their time comes to choose the software their company will use, the memory will come back.
Microsoft is standing tall in front of the young.
"The emperor has no clothes!!!"
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
One of the grand traditions of universities is hacking on the servers. We all know how well NT can stand up to that...
However, I don't advise complacency. Students will have to stand up for a real education and make sure the NT servers meet their doom. After all, NT is NOT a good operating system to use when teaching OS design and implementation. A 'school' that switches to it has screwed up priorities and isn't likely providing a quality CS education.
Hmm very concearnd... especially when I have just switched over my box at home to linux... People growing up with nt? Welll I guess that'd be good economically (you want rice? Seell your bones for dice attitude).... everyones gotta learn how to climb a mountain of humans with spiky hiking boots on.
IU had a plan to move their entire campus email to Exchange... until Melissa, after which that plan was scrapped. MSFT can try this tactic, but I think it will just show up how _unappropriate_ their stuff is, just like it's being shown up in the business sector right now. No worries.
The anti-Microsoft sentiment is rather high at Georgia Tech. A few years ago, the administrators came up with a computer ownership policy, requiring all incoming freshman to own a computer with a certain suite of software. No big surprise, they wanted everyone to run Windows 95. After pressure from the students citing free choice, the revised (and current) policy allows for both Windows and MacOS. (The Linux user group is in the process of compiling a compatible package for Linux users.)
I guess the situation would be vastly different in a liberal arts school, where the students wouldn't know nor care about their operating system. However, I find this to be a paradox. They wouldn't (for example) buy a car if it kept stalling every hour. Yet, they accept computer instability as a fact of life. One would think that, given their education in humanities and social sciences, that they wouldn't tolerate such a product.
As my daddy once said, "You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink."
First, let's separate 80%+ of the population who don't know Jack about computers. They blindly join the hoard of lemmings anyway. Focus on the small group that most of us can identify with: the CS major.
UNIX has some really excellent features that lends itself to teaching operating system theory. The UNIX system, in all of its forms including Linux and xxxBSD, provides clear understanding of how multi-user systems work. You can see the other processes (ps). You can see disks (df / bdf). You can limit the resources of processes (ulimit).
NT, while truely worthy of the name Operating System, is extremely poor when it comes to multi-user simutanous logins.
My guess it the True-CS-Professor (tm) will not drink from water brokers by accountants.
This is a boring sig
Gee... Like this should be a surprise to anyone? Microsoft pulling stuff like most other computer companies have? I was lucky in that Apple didn't consider Mississippi a viable market. IBM did, which is probably why most kids learned on IBM compatables.
Oh well... maybe the justice department will beat em in court. Hah.
My fear is, by that time it becomes bloody well obvious to everybody that M$ is a monopoly, it will be protected because we will also realize that this country needs M$ more that M$ needs this country.
There comes a point in addiction where you simply cannot detox; the addiction is killing you and detox would simply kill you faster. I've seen people go that way, and it isn't pretty. I don't want to see hexidecimal America do the same.
--The basis of all love is respect
is whether the apps they want to run on the client PCs are available for the OS. If you want to use Word, for example, you're limited to Windows or Mac. If you want to use Frame for desktop publishing, then you can go UNIX.
If the college is buying the client PC, price is a minor consideration, since the school can assess a higher "computer fee" to the students without too much trouble. It may be a different story if the students are the ones who are purchasing the computers, but students generally don't want to introduce too many compatibility problems between their PCs and the school's PCs.
As for the server side, since the techy people are (to an extent) in charge of those computers, I think you would find that the liberal arts schools would have the same situation as any other school.
from what ive seen at most universities, linux and mainly UNIX are the main backbone of the campus/faculty/students. its not going to change because windoze simply cant keep up with the demands and performance expected. Try simulating a simple 1 million node problem on an NT machine for example. It takes big muscle to do it..or a cluster of little muscle (think beowulf). Plus remote email thru a nice text shell (think pine) is nearly impossible with doze. most univs also have loong histories of unix and all their IT departments are unix centric.
I agree. One fact still remains:
I work at UF, Food & Resource Economics Dept. The grad students have thier own computer lab. The computers in the lab are MS machines...nothing will change is MS strikes some deal with UF or vice versa. And.. the grad lab is controlled by us..not UF. UF has its main computer labs which are seperate and run windows, macs, and unix terminals...nothing would change.
My guess is that MS is concenred with thier market share in education markets for the campus wide major computer networks (think IT services). So they want to work on that. I don't think Linux is anything but one of the ton of competitors already there, Novell, Sun, Notes, etc..
The classic development of UNIX in an university setting is a more research focus or students doing an intresting project focus.
It's not even like the mac examples the article pointed out, since must universitys don't officially support linux anyways. A real concern might be if say an exchange server gets installed and the admin for it decides that he doesn't want imap or pop clients to be able to connect, but then that is the admins choice. Even if some sort of incompatability like that came in to being, then someone will sit down and figure out the interface and write code to it.
The moderators out there are _SO_ picky! Jeeze!! I'm trynig to go from a -2 karma to a ZERO karma _JUST SO I CAN SEE THE METAMOD PAGE_ and everyone keeps moderating my posts!! Jesus! so I guess I won't post anymore. I guess that'll make _SOMEONE_ happy.
da w00t. mtfnpy?
Response from a liberal arts sociology student. We do hate computer crashes and bugs. I don't only use word, but use alot of data analysis software, which for the moment are only available for mac and m$ platforms. I installed linux for, i guess ethical and esthetic reasons, and also because I was sick and tired of having the m$ blackbox crash on me. I'm zero tech, and just getting linux to run on my laptop took me a couple of months but permitted me to familiarize myself with the OS and feel less dependent on you techs. Lucky for me. This summer windows crashed, major crash, not the usual daily freeze that was already pissing me off, installation of norton U. screwed up windows so much it can't reboot anymore. This happened during a production rush. That's when i took the big leap. It took me a day to figure out how to load cleanly my defunct windows partition in linux and to re-install staroffice (just about as bad as ms office, it's the only thing that has managed to make my linux os crash, happened yesterday, had to reboot, I'm going to switch to corel) and get things going. Got the report in on time, and haven't gotten around to fixing my windows partition yet. So it is possible for a lib arts student to switch to linux even if he is zero tech. We are mostly, in canada, a mac culture and hate m$ anyway, but mac the os is getting as klunky and lazy as windows. Linux could probably make it big time in the lib arts com, if there was a stable easy dist available on a "sexy" box. But mostly, you won't get anywhere with staroffice, it's worse than msoffice, corel's wordperfect is the right formula, but is way to ugly. When you are zero tech esthetics and reliability are all you look for in a OS, and linux still has a way to go, but it's on the right track. Eric Pineault, pineaulte@yahoo.com
I don't think this will work as well as people seem to think. The thing is that what a majority of people are used to running is unfortunately Windows. But when they come to the univeristy and there's something else there, people become curious and tries it out. And once you've felt the power of un*x you don't want to go back. And those already convinced of un*x's superiority isn't very likely to use Windows =). At least this is the case on my university (University of Lund, Sweden), which runs SunOS on most computers. There are NT rooms, but those are almost always empty, while the SunOS (Sparc 1,5,10) are always full. So, no, I don't think we should worry all to much.
No RedHat buyout here. The idea is that MS could cut deals with Universities to sway them into switching their UNIX systems to NT. It's not unethical at all - if they can give the schools something that they need then great - MS isn't always the wrong tool for the job. Now, it would be a shame if this sort of thing caused the # of UNIX systems out there in Academia to significantly decrease, because UNIX systems are wonderful learning tools. Even still, it's a competitive market, and this particular ploy isn't exactly unheard of or even, in my opinion, unethical.
What kind of logic is that? If you know how to browse the web, then you know how to use a WEB BROWSER, not windows. What does knowing how to use windows have to do with browsing the web? All you need is a browsing device.
Come on, if all your students do is browse the web then you should be less dependent on windows, or more accurately, you should be more independent of any OS.
If you're a university and you want to save money, get some thin clients for web browsing, where hardware upgrades are less expensive, and software upgrades are instant and hassle-free, and then you can spend more quality attention on your servers. And you want to be considered an academic institution that fosters inquisitivenes and open learning, rather than a business trade school, get a server OS where you can look under the hood!
Not to be dismissive of MS' tactics but this could backfire on them, maybe badly.
Over the last few years MS has pushed and pushed to get corporate IT types to move to an all MS environment from laptop to server. This push would use MS' desktop dominance to pressure Unix and Netware out of corporate machine rooms.
It seems to be failing. Corporate IT types have learned or are learning that NT falls over far too much to be anything more than a workgroup server.
So now they're trying to take over academia by first squeezing into the server rooms and then pushing down to the desktop? In my view it will never get farther than the server because the servers will be too busy falling over for MS to go anywhere else but out the door.
Yes, keep our eyes open, this monster is far from dead, and the wounded monster is often the most dangerous. But I think this tactic will fail - after a while.
-M
it would be killing the roots.. Ouch!
Oh yeah, WHO CARES ABOUT 1st POST????
This is the same reason I am disgusted by what Bill Gates considers his contribuitions to "Charity". Giving MS software to elementary and secondary schools? It's worse than the whole IE integration thing.
Sure he gives out some software that costs him nothing but could have been sold for several thousand dollars. And in return he gets a generation of kids who've been force fed his applications since the first time they touch a keyboard. If they don't get exposed to anything else then why would they even want to think about anything but MS solutions.
Of course the one saving grace is that kids more and more are questioning what they learn in school and questioning the schools themselves. My only hope is that kids revolt and turn agains MS because it's "what they get in school".
--- Juggle juggle@hitesman.com
This move is breathtaking innovation! Bill Gates is some kind of genius. The only thing wrong with the common person's idea is that they think he's a genius in software instead of in disingenuous and anti-competitive business practices.
Microsoft is trying to damage to linux.. They may as well not bother trying. There fondish wishes in trying to do damage to linux has been answered by way of Redhat... Things will change since redhat went Public... Boy look how rich those redhat guys are... Boy I bet it makes linux developers and independent developers feel good that RedHat made millions and millions off of there work... Bah!!! Sure makes me want to continue coding!! Here you go, have my Open Sourced code... Oh Redhat you want to use my Code in your distro... Yea go ahead make lots of money from my code... Makes me really want to do open sourced coding again...*Note* This message should be rea with sarcasm in mind, but I think you can see the underlying points.... and bad grammer... Blade
I left Kansas State University earlier this year. At the time that I left, they'd signed a deal with Oracle to provide copies of their database server on several platforms (Solaris [both sparc and x86], Irix, NT and of all things, Novell). There was also talk about getting the Linux version so departments without a lot of cash could have a powerful database server. Found out the other day that the deal for Linux was killed because Linux was "too full of security holes". (sigh) I guess I'm glad I'm gone ...
James
There are many open source items that either can work on NT or involve linking NT to UNIX systems.
Samba is one; Virtual Network Computing another.
Of course, Apache has been ported to NT,while Perl and Python will work on Windows. There are many other examples.
GNU or some other outfit should develop an open source X Server to run on Windows. This is a major omission.
So the inclusion of Windows does not mean the exclusion of Open Source. There is much that can be done in a Windows environment.
I tried it.
All the references I found were clearly sarcastic.
Oops.
D
----
Public universities and other governmental agencies should be forbidden from using any non-free software unless they can prove that there is no appropriate free software available for a particular application.
--
Interested in XFMail? New XFMail home page
second operating system. This is what our University CS department decided. Due to a new certification that they wanted to get, they needed to teach two platforms. We already had Suns running Solaris, and IBM running MVS, and SGIs running IRIX. No one wants to learn MVS, so they added NT and Visual Studio.
As a side note, at work I'm required to develop using Microsoft products. I chose Visual Studio; Particularily Visual J++. I was unable to find very much info about J++ and the reviews I read were mostly favorable. Then I learned about the Microsoft Delegate, a so-called Java language extension that was basically a function pointer (how OO can you get!) All M$ generated code had these stupid delegates all over the place, because WFC is C++ and relies on function pointers instead of object pointers that Java uses. In the end, you get a bastardized product that can only be ported by completely rewriting the entire GUI.
I would assume that C++ in Visual Studio is more true to the philosophy of C++: a function-based language that supports OO extensions, but this shows just how little M$ respects current philosophy and doctrine of current programming practices. To me, VS is a bad choice, and Code Warrior or Borland development systems would be better.
>What if MS buys Redhat?!?!?! They will rename it "M-Shat"
Two points are worth noting.
1. One of IBM's greatest marketing blunders was letting unix boxes take over in the university environment - the result was that every technically trained and degreed person in the last 20 years has unix experience. Their wonderful MVS OS with its beautiful JCL/Cobol/ CICS language environment is taught only in trade schools - and roundly despised by anyone with any other experience.
2. M$ did something like this with the California state school system in the last couple of years. There was quite an uproar of opposition but I have forgotten the outcome. I have seen reports of other deals like this for at least a couple of years - maybe targeted more at unix than linux, at least until now.
The CS department is still going to be on all UNIX (SGI's and SUN's) And the servers are going to remain that way as well. Mainly HP-UX. Our News server runs off of a Linux box. The only NT servers we have are a print server (for printing quotas) and an exchange server.
As a consultant the majority of the questions I field are Microsoft related. Be it regarding PPP setup, or Office quirks. I have never fielded a question pertaining to UNIX/Linux. And if I field a Mac question it is usually about MS Office.
So you make your own conclusion. As it stands, schools are really cheap. They are going to go with the most economically sound setup. And do to the maintenance variable, that setup is UNIX for servers.
It's not like this is a new plan cooked up by Microsoft. Many Unix vendors are already doing similar things. Sun, SGI, and IBM give big discounts to universities on their Unix products. IBM is especially prone to giving away a lot of stuff.
I don't see Microsoft getting very far because the others will simply do similar things. Universities live on freebies and discounts.
My college (an engineering school) switched to M$ stuff when I was a freshman and they are still with them after I've graduated. Being the only choice around campus yes we were forced to use Word and Windows and stuff like that. For Computer Science projects, we were forced to learn and use Unix (gcc was the compiler of choice and Emacs and vi the editors of choice by the professors). So IT people are forced to buy Windows... Big freakin' deal... That's IT, not Computer Science. I'll start worrying when the Computer Science text books used are written by Microsoft and the Operating Systems class only talks about NT until then, relax... If Computer professors around academica are as crusty and old fashioned as mine were, Linux/Unix is in safe hands and these fine professors will continue to teach aspiring COMPUTER SCIENCE students how to use UNIX. Sure, there are many college students that have never seen a bash command prompt but, does that mean that linux will die? Don't think so... Is there anyone out there who can call themselves a coder and has NEVER seen a unix shell? Be sensible... Hell, has anyone out there ever graduated with a CS degree and had taken a course that had Windows NT in it and NOT had a course that had UNIX in the title of it?
In the long run, the cost of hardware and software is minor compared with the cost of maintaining the computer network. From experience (mine as well as many other people) Windows NT has a very high cost of ownership. We introduced NT in our department for faculty and staff. What a nightmare. A single server and a dozen or so clients took more time and energy to maintain than about a dozen UNIX servers and 50 to 75 workstations. My point is, if universities are concerned about the cost of their computer labs, they ought to think long and hard about moving to 100% NT. Cheap NT licensing might be tempting, but I suspect that it is going to buy a lot of frustration and heartache in the long run.
:-)
On the other hand, if universities do get burned, they can easily switch to Linux considering they will have all the hardware.
They need money for better computing solutions, so they seek to strike a deal with Microsoft (well known for their cheap and inexpensive solutions), while many people would suggest FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, or even more surprisingly, GNU/Linux. Using any of those alternatives would be tons cheaper than using NT for all your servers (you also might not have as much of a headache).
"Would Linux exist today if Torvalds had never encountered UNIX, and instead spent his time mastering the intricacies of Windows NT?"
Well, no, but then, did they have NT when he was in school? Instead we'd have the GNU system with the "other" kernel.. the accursed one named with mutually recursive acronyms (not that I'm slamming the Hurd, I just think its name is funny).
Speaking of which, a slight dive offtopic.. Someone mentioned a while back during one of those GNU/Linux vs. Linux arguments that Linus Torvalds had gone on record as saying GNU/Linux was the official name. If anyone has a link to an online resource which documents such an assertion, please email me.. I've yet to find a Linus interview that even /mentioned/ GNU. :)
~ Kish
by a university's choice to go MS -- it doesn't seem like they provide any solutions "big enough iron" so to speak.
... but the all-solid-state stuff probably wasn't)
Here at CMU (which is not that big a university, ~6000 undergrads) we run a massive distributed filesytem, afs, which is commercially available and was developed in part here (if we reimplemented the "andrew" system today it would probably be around CODA, which is Free iirc). The distributed fileservers have always been Solaris (and also a bit of HP-UX), and I'm not aware you could replace them with NT if you wanted to. AFS is supported by a a wide variety of clients: NT, Linux (and the other Unices), Mac.
The individual departments are not likely to give up their own special types of computers -- Design and Art want their SGIs, many of the professors (and students) use Macs, and the geeks all use Linux and Solaris. What solution based on NT can serve all those clients, for a system with tens of thousands of total users?
I just don't see any other way to run a computing environment the size of a university other than Kerberos and heavy-duty distributed fs stuff. Perhaps I'm missing something?
I certainly don't believe MS could provide anything like CMU's reliability. I've been here over a year now. Once or twice the routing has broken for a few minutes, and once the university blew a power feed and everything on the other side of the street shut down for a day (actually a lot of it was running on backup
>I swear, by my life and love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man nor ask another man to live for mine.
-- Galt's oath, from Atlas Shrugged
>... No Microsoft could live by that oath. However, the GPL does seem to resonate with it, doesn't it?
Au contraire. The GPL, as much as any manifesto I've ever seen, actually tends to devalue original contributions if they're based to any degree on somebody else's prior work - and just about everything in computing is based to some degree on prior work somewhere - by not allowing them to profit even from their own contributions. I won't go quite so far as to say the GPL is socialist, but it's certainly not resonant with Galt's Oath.
Perhaps more importantly, the attitudes of the many people who insist everything be GPLed not out of principle but primarily so they personally can get their grubby little paws all over it and possibly adapt it to their own use without giving anything at all back to "the community" seem to be in direct violation of Galt's Oath. These people most definitely want others to live for their benefit.
Of course, Rand's appeal is mostly based on the observation that simple ideas appeal to simple minds. Most people realize that life is more complex than that, and outgrow Rand before they leave college. Nonetheless, if you're going to base your argument on those ideas, at least try to do it honestly.
Slashdot - News for Herds. Stuff that Splatters.
Sure microsoft can give away or even pay universities to use their crap but they can't easily fight the ingrown Unix culture and the fact that Linux allows students to play under the hood. If you want to do research into a new network protocol or O/S scheduling algorithm, you are going to play with something that you can understand and change.
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
May have to be department-specific. For instance, Cornell's CS department recently sold out to M$. They are now officially pure M$. (Profs can run non-M$ machines but get no support from the dept.) But other departments have kept their independence.
I've worked in NT and UNIX environments. I've read the article. Here are some humble opinions. First, if Microsoft is starting to understand the strategic importance of universities as conveyors of tech culture, and is viewing their graduates who go out to attain academic and business positions where they make purchasing decisions, great. But if Microsoft really gives a 2 @^#!@$ about academia for real, prove it. Show me the source code. For every product you allow on campus, give me the ability to look under the hood. NT, and the entire MS model, as it stands, does not allow CS or other students to LEARN about systems. UNIX of course, does. For the first few years of my programming journey, I worked exclusively on Windows machines. I programmed pretty well on them, but it wasnt until I was exposed to UNIX that I saw what computers were really all about. Fundamentals were laid bare. Light bulbs went off. I understood I didnt need to be afraid anymore, to adhere to a tool to succeed. The underlying principles were ALL THE SAME. MS has always sought to obscure the obvious, hide the truth, at the marketing __and__ the technical level, making the neophyte believe that one of the essential ingredients to any www system is an 'internet information server', not just an old HTTP thingy. How can we place our trust, and our students, in the hands of a company that refuses to tell it like it is? Also, in reading this article, I couldn't help but wonder where Sun, HP, Oracle, etc were in the picture. Perhaps this is a recent shift of perception in computer business, with campuses are starting to be seen as a 'hill to be taken' in the battle, rather than cash-rich cows to be milked. Well, this is: Good for Microsoft, because perhaps companies like SUN and HP have well-established business relationships with universities using UNIX, good for universitiee, who now have bargaining leverage when making hardware and software purchasing decisions. Sun and HP, etc may lose universities as a revenue source, and might have to start viewing universities along the lines discussed above. Well, competition of this sort is good. I unfortunately have this horrible fear of some 'administrator' making purchasing decisions, and relying on the 'nobody ever got fired for buying microsoft' tactic. Does that happen? Anyone have any expereinces on this? Finally, another boring testimonial. From an experiental standpoint, UNIX blows NT out of the water for anything serious. In specific, I work on medium-to-large sized software development projects (50+ developers), doing database, application level stuff, source code management, build coordination (imake, make, etc). You just cant do this stuff as well or as easily on NT. Period. Client side, NT Workstation is fine, and for now, perhaps better. Thanks
It says in the article and I quote "So campus computing administrators are turning to vendors for help."
That means that the admins are going to Microsoft not vice versa, if the admins dont like Microsoft then don't ask them for help.
Slashdot made it sound like MS is trying to kill Linux. The article was talking about Unix in general. And it said nothing about MS specifically going after Linux.
Please note that many companies such as Apple give educational discounts a;sp, should we be scared Apple going to kill Unix....Get a grip folks
What a coincidence.
MS did the same thing in Australia, for
the same price -- $6 million (but only
Australian dollars = US$4 million) for
unlimited MS software for Queensland schools
for 5 years.
(The state of Qld has about 2 million people.)
Obviously this will get kids hooked. The suit-wearers who cut these deals with MS don't know what harm they're doing.
It reminds me of the girls who are paid to walk around SE Asian discos giving out free cigarettes.
It's dangerous, but also a sign of desperation.
Linux is overtaking MS so fast now that MS simply doesn't have a chance.
Using any OS that doesn't let you look under the hood is inappropriate for a university setting, where you are supposed to learn deeper concepts that will endure. University students should be expanding on the most fundamental learning, and should take nothing for granted. They certainly should not be learning trade skills like MCSE in a university setting. That is the lowest.
I can't believe that a university would sully it's reputation (and the reputation of institutions of higher learning in general) by reducing the depth of it's computing students' real-world experience to what surface-scratching you get from MS software. I mean, what kind of admins are you going to produce? The kind that know how to work a GUI and have the MS tech support number memorized? Those people are a dime a dozen. They get cranked out of trade schools, and half of their knowledge is tied to the latest version of their GUI. If you can't differentiate your CS majors from your MCSE's then how can you call your school an institution of higher learning? It's more like higher-level learning.
Phase I.
If microsoft can't deminish the linux phenom, I wouldn't doubt that they start PAYING! university's to use their stuff. I.E. like what Pepsi, Coors, Nike,etc do to sports. They pay for a large portion of a new stadium or whatever so that they can have their name on the scoreboard or the stadium itself. Then they sell just their stuff inside the stadium. So Microsoft will pay university to use only NT/Win9x/W2k/etc. and maybe display their logo on all webpages/emails/etc. They are already allowing them to hand out software for free. How can a university turn down free servers/software/etc and also get payed for it?
Sure, techies say "NT is crap" but Budget and administration say "Great, we don't have to spend money and we get money to buy other things." So you see Microsoft is surrounding its enemies by creating allies with Universities.
Phase II.
Microsoft has so much money right now that they can do such a thing for 5 years and convert people to NT/W2k. Sure they won't make alot of money but after the 5 years, Microsoft will quit paying universities and start again with the payed licenses. By then most of the mission critical apps are on NT/W2k and it would be too costly to convert back to Unix/Linux. Now they have them right where they want them. Sure there may be a small amount of Unix/Linux servers around but Microsoft has done what they have wanted all along - conquered its allies enough to claim their land and holdings as theirs.
So you see, Linux must succeed and must be pushed out to the masses. It must run mission critical apps and as well as the games. If Linux succeeds so does its big brother Unix in all flavors. We can't let Microsoft woo us into speeches of "a promise land of free software and hardware."
Never shut your eyes when microsoft is in the room. Use their software to get things done but don't stop using other resources. As the old saying goes, "keep your friends close, but keep your enemies even closer."
I'm out.
-- Paranoid
Think about going under the hood on an Apple.
Geez! Can't find a CLI let alone the frigging source.
How quickly we forget! I used the same apples you did, and they came with full source code. The lisa and macintosh put an end to that practice.
It's a smart strategy. Apple did this, now look how far they've fallen after they stopped seeding educational institutions. There's no reason, except possibly greed, why RedHat couldn't get some mileage out of its nice, hefty large market cap and do the same thing.
The author seemed pleasant enough, although the promotion of his own personal agenda was fairly annoying. The worst part was that whole learning Unix from one's elders thing -- my eyes actually rolled when I read that.
Since someone said that it was a redux of an old article, I'm curious whether Linux made its appearance in the original, or if they just added Linux as a shameless attempt to catch a ride on the bandwagon. Throwing Linux into the mix seems to make some of his paper contradictory, something better explained later when I'm not screaming at this football game. TTFN.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
Brandeis is down to 22% Macs? Really? I guess this is because they finally got a fscking clue and changed the craptastic appletalk network over to ethernet. I remember people bitching about it when i was a freshman in '94. We'd've lived in any dorm and paid extra for ethernet....
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
The problem is not so much with the *academic* side, it is more pressure from MS on university administrations. Admin move to NT/windows and then they start to pressure the academics to use windows/NT so that we can read their emails - with attachments - or account balances - using excel. This pressure should not be trivialized. In the university where I work, do not expect money from the IT department (admin controlled) to purchase any non MS operated computers.
Here at Penn State, the university just struck a deal with MS that would let them distribute software to all students/faculty. All the press coverage of the deal mentioned nothing about requiring the school to move their workstations/servers over to NT. I couldn't see that happening anyway. Overall, each department seems to choose their system independantly of the other.
Computer Science --> Unix
Electrical Eng. --> NT
etc.
Then on top of that we've got different administrative departments:
The Office of Telecommunications -->Unix
Center for Academic Computing --> Mix of both
I'm not all that familiar with what every department uses. Maybe some other Penn Stater knows more than I do.
The general computer labs all seem to be running NT, with Macs scattered about it for those students who use them.
Overall I can't see some of our services ever using NT. Our mail system is a very nice example. Penn State has over 100,000 students spread out all over the state. If you add all the TA's and faculty, that number rises even more. All of us use the same POP and SMTP server. Can you honestly see 100,000 + people all using an NT server for email? God save us if that were to happen.
Overall, we seem to have a very knowledgable staff supporting the university's computing needs. If MS were to pressure them to use their products, I have faith that our staff wouldn't make the wrong decision.
To add to that. I don't need any MS software. Just leave me alone dammit.
I'm a grad student in EECS at Berkeley. I have been seeing more and more NT machines in the computer labs in Cory and Soda lately (and less Unix ones). In fact, I decided against taking a certain EE course this semester because NT and MS Visual C++ were required for the course project. At least I still have a Sun Ultra at my desk, although the SysAdmin says he may be throwing out all the Suns to make room for new NT machines very soon. Needless to say, I am not thrilled about the prospect of being forced to use NT.
http://iesg.EECS.Berkeley.EDU/ntplan/
Basically it says: EECS is going NT because NT offers security, stability, a common OS, ease of support, software maintenance and installation.
This makes me sick too.
Realistically, this type of change has been occuring in institutions of all types in both directions. If Microsoft can make inroads with some Universities, they are more than likely to create a similar percentage of Windows haters as they have created in other areas.
Lets face it, nearly every Linux user, and especialy Linux activist, has moved away from another, in their opinion, lesser OS, be that MVS, VMS, OS2, MacOS, and even WIN32. Everybody's reasons are individualized, but usually center around usability, stability, assessability, and pleasure derived from using the system.
If you believe in Linux, then you know it has what it takes to fill the OS needs of many different types of users, realistically we also know that it doesn't suit every user.
Just wait and see how many universitys who "switch to Windows" find their administrators running Linux on crucial servers that they don't wan't to rebuild from the ground up once a month, or reboot once a day. Just like the domination of Linux in IT groups in corporate America.
John
Soda Hall, isn't there?
I would note that, despite donations from
Intel, the UCB Math Department just bought
a whole bunch of new Ultras.
Brazilian Universities are moving to linux client side (server side is already almost Unix) because Windows is so expensive to them. We used to have pirated copies of Windows, but there are some law against this here now, so linux is growing a lot on universities.
-- You are in a twisty maze of passages, all alike.
Doesn't Disney own a large chunk of McDonalds?
You guys would be less paranoid if you didn't sit around all day thinking about who's "out to get" you.
What if MS makes a Linux distro!??!?
What if MS buys Redhat?!?!?!
What if MS decides to use perl!?!?!?
What if MS thinks about Linux?!?!?!?
What if Bill Gates breathes?!?!?!
I'm sorry but it seems as though slashdot makes a point of posting obvious flamebait. The more you promote this Them or Us attitude you are going to have trouble. No wonder most Linux advocates are nuts... You can't even read a fucking how-to without seeing hateful rants about Microsoft.
Grow up already.
Joan of Arc would have jumped in the fire
voluntarily if she'd had to use Linux all day...
--
Stop MS at the High School level. Email the District Tech. Coordinator of your local highschools and demand that Opensource, CopyLeft software be installed on all of the district's servers. Go to school board meetings and raise awareness about *nix in schools. People deciding how to spend your tax money must respond to you, so let's make demands. If this is coordinated, the District administrators might collectively get clue. It might help if you are an important person in the community who has kids in AP classes.
Here is the problem - Very few in the tech industry cares about Microsoft.... why? because it's a moneymaker - and that's all it is. Microsoft is setting themselves up for defeat in this arena why?
Colleges don't want to spend money, and they haven't for years --- Do you think that Berkley pays for BSD? or that the UW pays for Linux etc.? They have a very long standing relationship with Unix -- the entire infastructure is built upon it... why would they for a couple of small products have to hire MCSE's (think about it folks -- they will need to do this the Microsoft way) when they have a whole bunch of Computer Sci students that can admin. the IT infastructure for pennies on the dollar, or free?
This one is a good idea by Microsoft, but I honestly think that they better watch another commercial competitor -- yes Apple. Apple (from what I hear) is going to be striking some major deals with public schools and colleges using their normal client software and their (BSDish) MacosX The end thing here is that Microsoft (still) does not have a good server OS, and until Linux becomes more 'user friendly' most home users or clients are not going to want to use it... I made the switch years ago to Linux, and I have seen amazing improvements but -- they are meeting head on ... who will win?
Well in this scenario Think of the nightmare of trying to get this approved just to begin with -- First this deal is going to have to be approved by the head of the IT/CS department, then the students (who would have to learn a whole different OS to keep their jobs) and finally - the budget committe or otherwise accounting (once they see what an MCSE goes for they will simply put a denied stamp on it). -- Some small colleges will go to this, the larger ones for example UW, Berkley, and CMU will not.
What do you think?
Go figure.
The problem, as I've observed, is that what makes M$ economically viable is not market dynamics but rather politics. In a lot of universities (and a lot of businesses, too) IT is a highly political area. It doesn't matter that macs are statistically proven to have a lower TOC than Winblows machines. It doesn't matter linux servers are more robust than NT servers. The IT people have power to force windows on everyone, and if you don't like it, go look for another job/school. When Microsoft gives away software, they just give more legitimacy to greedy, incompentant, power-hungry IT departments who have never had the school's/company's best interest in mind.
Gates gives 5 Billion dollars a year to charity, mostly for cancer research. And what have Linux companies donated too? It all comes down to what is living, not what OS your machine is running.
directory on ftp://cs.cornell.edu. They changed
the hostname into ftp://ftp.cs.cornell.edu) you get
a greeting which tells you, that this FTP server
is running on Windows NT.
I wouldn't care if the mirror software I was using
('mirror' and 'wget') wouldn't have stopped working.
A sysadmin there answered my complaint: Sounds like a joke but it is really sad:
they introduce an incompatibility with UNIX
software which has a market share on the server
side of approx. 75% (see here). And then they
claim that these problems are Linux's faults.
When Microsoft enters the game,
compatibility is among the first victims.
No, they're not. They are derivatives of BSD. BSD is a derivative of UNIX. Bust out your history book, you troll.
"Now follow that argument to its logical conclusion and tell me I'm not using Linux, I'm using Debian."
Someone as ignorant as you can use Debian? Wow. I'm impressed. Or perhaps you're just misrepresenting. At any rate, Debian is not an operating system. Debian is a distribution of an operating system. That system is the GNU/Linux system. Thus, you are using Linux, because that is the kernel of the system. UNIX is an OS, not a distribution. BSD is an OS, not a distribution of UNIX, but rather a derivative thereof. FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD are OSes, not distributions of BSD, but rather derivatives thereof.
Now ask yourself: If you were smart, would you have to post anonymously to keep people from knowing who it was who made comments as stupid as yours are?
~ Kish
There's two different levels of users at a Uni.
The average joe and those that NEED computers for their course.
I've recently just finished an MSc at an UK university and during the four years that i was there, there was a slow and painful change to WinNT as the major OS across the campus. During that time the uni backbone basically ground to a halt under all the unecessary crap that NT likes to send around the network.
The computing staff said that this was because the majority of people coming into the uni only really needed to browse the web, send email and write essays, therefore Windows was best because EVERYBODY knows how to use windows....
The departments that need to use computers for things other than browsing the web etc. such as CS, Electronics, Physics all have their own network of Solaris/Linux machines because they know that it's more reliable, efficient etc.
I suspect that they will always maintain there *NIX networks because of this, no matter what MS does or tries to do. Let's face it. Is NT *really* up to the task of running a large CAD system, doing nuclear physics calculations etc.... I doubt people running a simulation that takes a week to complete would be too happy about having to reboot their NT box every day... you'd never get any work done.
The thing that we need to do is make sure that people going into academia at degree level have already had exposure to *NIX so that they know the benefits, no matter what subject they are doing. Remember, the CS/IT students or even the Art History students of today are tomorrows sys. admins.... with the power to make purchasing decisions.
Just my £0.02 worth
Iggy
If Microsoft is willing to give support to universities that no other vendor is willing to give, then why should we criticize them? One of the big ways that we all spread Linux awareness is by giving it away for free. With students especially, this is very successful, as it gets them used to UNIX-style tools, etc. If any other company (you listening, RedHat?) were do take a step like this, we'd laud them for helping out the University community, etc. But, of course, if MS does the same thing, it's a greedy attempt to take over the world. Hello folks, it doesn't matter which platform "takes over the world" - it matters that Universities have the resources they need to support what REALLY goes on there - pursuit of knowledge. That has nothing to do with this or that platform.
Flame away...
Can your IM do this?
Pinkerton and specifically the Company Town things (like the Pullman Strike) are problems intertwined with the police state. Big government has no small role in the worst aspects of free market economics. The term you're looking for in this case is Feudalism - the worst extension of free market economics, and exact opposite of Communism.
:)
Consider economics and political power to be like a solar system. There is a central sun pulling in a system of planets which are all moving away, but since the inward and outward pull is equalized, everything is stable. Then a bunch of asteroids (and I do mean a lot) fall into the sun and add to its mass; it acquires a stronger pull, and the planets' orbits get smaller. This is what happens when corporations and governments get more power (corporations by mergers and expansion, governments by "emergency" legislation/jurisdiction expansion tactics). Well suddenly the sun is too fragging big and everything starts getting sucked in. In MicroSoft's case you have a neutron star, or maybe even a magnetar or a black hole.
I can see Universities going down the drain nowadays using the Dilbert principles. The latest trend is to bring business and corporate methods to schools and it's already showing.
There are too many stupid professors already. They don't think about science or students. What's worse, they are distancing themselves from the real world just like bosses. So they decide to go all NT because they buy the marketing hype from Microsoft. It's ridiculous.
A friend of mine works at a big university. The stories I hear all the time are worse than the daily Dilbert strip. Once he had to go to a course out of town for five days because the professor didn't want his course to look bad because of too little attendees. In the end the majority of people were there only to increase headcount. And the ironic part is that they didn't get paid extra but had to work two unpaid weekends to do the work they missed during the unnecessary course.
Bottom line is: Many universities are already run by morons. If they continue to do bad decisions, all the brains leave and fast.
... not sure what you mean. Do you mean that the creator of ASCII should get credit for every program out there that uses ASCII somehow?
You got a point, there; although you seem prone to equate an idea with its advocates.
.. of course, you're also an insulting prick. Why do you always make personal attacks? Small penis? Debate club geek always on the loosing side? What?
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
>of course, you're also an insulting prick. Why do you always make personal attacks? Small penis?
The irony meter is pegged, sir.
Slashdot - News for Herds. Stuff that Splatters.
As an Indiana U journalism/computer science major, I've got to add that there was protest here when the big Microsoft deal went down. Ol' Billy came to give a speech here shortly after that and there were protesters outside Assembly Hall and fliers denouncing the deal.
Here's the problem, though, joe average student doesn't care. Joe average student doesn't even know that OSes besides Microsoft Windows exist. When I need to print something, I always go to a Mac lab, because there's never a line. And forget about Linux, because right now the learning curve is way beyond most students.
Here's the good news: The people who care about Linux are the people who code, right? Every CS professor I've had at IU hates Microsoft as much as the next geek. Furthermore, most of my classes so far have been java based. Also, as far as I know, 90% of the servers here are unix-based. I think there's a few NT file servers. _shrug_ We get our email with Pine like everybody else.
The fact that students can get Microsoft software freely and easily on campus is a bit of a problem, though. When I first learned about Linux last year and searched around for a distro on CD, I couldn't find one. LUGs out there that are concerned with advocacy need to burn distros and advertise a quick and easy way to pick them up.
When I started college, in 1995, the intro classes were pascal and we programmed on the vax systems. The next year they moved over to C++ on the windows system and I moved on to upperlevel classes that mainly delt with c and unix internals. I went to the University of Hartford where Professor John S. Gray teaches who is the auther of a really good book, at least I think it is, called Interprocess Communications In Unix.
I am so glad I got there a year early, although I ahd to deal with the vax systems for a year, because the rest of my time spent at the school was spent using mainy Sun systems where I actually learned just about everything. Learning on a Unix/Linux system is just a totally different way of learning. Its really hard to explain to people that have always used windowed envrironments but for those who use unix/linux they know what I man talking about.
But even beyond that the Unix/Linux environment along with OSS is so much more self satisfying. I don't contribute anything really at this point besides testing of software. But I do know that a few times I have done things like e-mail the creator of eterm and tell him that he should add something to his readme because he assumed people knew something that they probably did not. And I e-mailed the creator of the module Storable and told him what error I was getting and he sent me a fix and I tested it for him and it all went well.
But what happens when I use my NT system, this happens a lot, and I dial up to the internet and ras crashes on me? I have to do a hard reboot... can I e-mail someone at microsoft the error I was getting and have them send me a fix for it? I have never tired but I am sure they will not respond to me if I did... at least not within a few hours, or even within a few minutes. I would have to wait for a service pack to come out usually.
My point is we all know OSS is better because if there is a problem you can either solve it yourself or contact the person that made the product your using but if your using a proprietary system you can't really do that unless your paying tons of money for system support. I am just glad I had a great professor and knowledgable Unix guru teaching me! Don't let Unix go away!
--MD--
--MD--
As an aside, the article is interesting but it prompts the question: Has Linux reached a critical mass such that these techniques are too late to affect Linux drastically, or will Linux wind up being touted as another case of MS's domination at some future anti-trust case?
--
not to worry, folks will come back to *x operating sytems when the realize that they are better. I have absolutly no desire to leave linux for Windoze, and i bet quite a few sysadmins feel that way. Plus the wonder about it all is that even if everyone leaves linux for something else we'll still have the source code and we'll still be able to develop it, not to worry.
char *stupidsig = "this is my dumb sig";
I think the thing to worry about is not wether the web servers at university will be replaced with NT machines. The _real_ concern would be if(when) Microsoft decides to push the use of NT machines into actual CS development courses at universities. RIght now, the courses break down generally so that the first 2 years you program on win32 environment with a language like pascal or java, and then move on to the more powerful UNIX environments. This is fine with me. The beginning courses just teach you the basics of programming languages, and a little bit about software development in general.
If the higher lever courses switch to win32 environments, however, I would be _Extremely_ worried. Win32 has no place in serious development. As long as you're building dialog boxes from a wizard, or learning basic language constructs, windows machines are fine. Beyond that, UNIX just offers _more_. UNIX is gloriously heterogeneous, while windows is monotonous as hell.
-Laxative
I just got back from a trip to UNC Chapel Hill. Centralizing unix support. Screwing things up. And charging a whole lot for nothing. While encouraging NT.
/usr/bin;.). Programs did not work. Users did not understand that this was not UNIX's fault, it was the stupid adminstation. But since they could not understand the problem, or get support, it was a UNIX problem. They were supposed to be adding a dozen unix admins, but they had not done it yet (still only a rumored 4).
As part of the latest computing plan, they are giving Windows boxes in exchange for old boxes.
Charging a $1000 a year to connect a Unix box to the network. They say that they will do the support, but the damn admins seems to have broken the setup after a major breakin (path was
It's a great way to encourage windows. Charge for unix support, hire poor admins, and give away windows computers.
We do need to be concerned by this. It is happening. My school (the Univ. of Utah) recently moved its undergrad computing lab to 100% NT. Our current chairman is Bill Gate's bedfellow. He preaches the power of the windows environment day in and day out in his courses (he teaches a software dev. series required for all entering UGs, don't remember the name, I'm a Grad, thank god.)
The students all start out in the engineering lab's Unix/Linux environment for the pre-major courses. Then they're ripped away, told there's more to the world than Unix, and they almost invariably never see the Unix lab again. Even the hardware/logic design class is using NT. (VeriBest... yeah, a name like that and you wonder why it sucks so bad...) They used to use PowerView on Solaris. There were a few problems, of course, but it was infinitely better than VeriWorst. I know, I've used them both. I used to hate PowerView, but after using VeriWorst, I decided I loved PowerView.
Well, I've rambled enough. Consider this a warning. It's happening.
...and it's scary. Quite a few students were allready aware of M$'s buyouts of various departments:
Student Computing Services and the Business departments get to offer MSCE for a grand total of about $3000 (wait! that's an $8000 discount compared to other places! gee i wonder how much they're actually getting charged?)
The college of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science is rumored to get anything they want from M$, but I really don't know much about that.
Several other departments spurradically get software gifts from M$. Two years ago a department got over 50 license packs of both Windows 95 and Office 97. This year they're getting around 20 copies of Office 2K and 5 for NT Server.
There are a couple of effects of this upgrade.
O2K = hardware upgrade. I personally think it's insane to install it on anything with less than 64MB & W98 and difficult to install on something with less than 128MB. Furthermore O2K nixes full backwards compatability with Schedule+, which quite a few people in one department use. The only way to share scedules then is to get a funky M$ "postoffice" mail server ($$). Fortunately there was a way to reinstall Schedule+.
So the department suddenly has $10,000 of justifyable need for upgrades because they're trying to install O2K on 20 P100's with 32MB and need a new M$ postoffice to share schedules.
For me to endorse this is suicidal. My payroll budget is stripped and helping them utalize these wonderful new gifts from M$ would put me out of work, unless they can get more funding from the University when enrollment is going down.
I wonder how long untill some SCS person complains about how slow Netware is making all the machines (and it does with Win95/98)... and M$ steps up, provides the software. Then suddently SCS spends a bit on hardware and M$ certification courses are required for your job growth in a career that will rarely break $15/hour & never pay overtime (state law that no student can work more than 40/week - i think).
...of course Gateway is pleased as peaches. They've just about got exclusivity for new system purchasing.
It really hurts to be "#1 most wired public school"... now WSU's gotta live up to it.
Fortunatly Linux provides a wonderful alternative to M$'s domination plan. This year almost every system that I've seen in EECS that was running some proprietary UNIX has moved to Linux (Redhat, none the less Linux). CS students are starting out on Linux, and Junior/Senior level students learn assembly by programming for the Unix system. This year the LUG at WSU has a regular gang of 15 to 20 and growing. All calculus students are forced to do "Mathematica" labs, on RH 5.2 boxes. Linux was covered once in the campus paper, and I'm hearing rumors about a few grad students working on cluster computing (Beowulf?!) for analyzing scientific data. Finally Unix System administrating has been taught 2 semesters straight and is getting a lot of attention from MIS majors.
crazy place to go to school, that's for sure...
No, I'm not making this up. I know a few CS professors and researchers at the local universities that have these machines. Although they've thought about replacing the OS, the risk is too high. The threat is that all the machines would be taken away and that's significant value to the university.
This gets Microsoft two big advantages. First, cutting edge research gets developed on their OS. Other OSes may get supported on other boxes, but that's more effort. At least Microsoft is sure the software works on their system. Unix development becomes the second choice.
Second, and more indirect, is that these professors starting using Microsoft as their primary OS. The universities typically don't give the professors multiple machines. So, this influence propigates through the rest of the department and to the students.
Most of the professors realize they are being used, and try to work around it as much as possible, but with research money and resource being scarce, they have to use the machines the best they can.
- |Daryll
"Would Linux exists today et al."
Perhaps not. But instead of Hurd we would probably be running BSD. And what is wrong with that?
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Wow! What a thought. The NT sysadmins are in for a nightmare. Wanna change your grade? hack a profs page? Get personal info on that foxy lady? Endless possibilities.
Thing about the INTEL deal is that you can run linux, solaris x86, or windows on the INTEL boxes.
The boxes just come with NT installed, but INTEL says you can install any OS you want.
Good lord.
Microsoft has dipped their toes in another odd place where it shouldn't have. Microsoft is spreading itself all over, and now it's reaching not only into our homes, but into our schools. Students will be reading their textbooks from a small electronic "book", run by Microsoft's software 'Read'. Microsoft is dominating the market not too unlinke the Borg on Star Trek: The Next Generation. They are doing a lot, without a lot of quality. If we let this continue, when microsoft finally dies, the world will crumble to it's knees, because all the software that they used to love, now is defunct.
Just my 2c.
da w00t. mtfnpy?
A lot of us really don't like Microsoft and that is the way it is here on Slashdot. If it bothers you sooooo much, plug in "I love Bill Gates" into the msn search engine and enjoy.
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I guess my last post could also be considered flamebait.
I am just a Master-flame-bator I guess..
*wink*
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Like MIT, Stanford's CS department has a new
Gates building.
As at MIT, there are no production Windows NT
Servers in the Gates building.
However, the Graduate School of Business (both
Stanford's and MIT's) is heavily Microsoft-biased.
Everyone *must* have a computer in the GSB NT
Domain.
It's a good strategy -- people who don't know any
better assume that the best and brightest MIT and
Stanford CS students have some relationship with
Microsoft, and the future PHBs who will eventually
make the real decisions get indoctrinated.
Incidentally, behind the scenes, the Stanford
GSB's entire infrastructure relies on two HP
Vectras running ISC DHCPd. They were literally
about to be thrown away because they weren't
powerful enough to run NT anymore. Despite
three months of effort by full-time Microsoft
employees with the personal attention of Steve
Ballmer (Stanford GSB alum), the high-end HP
servers donated to the GSB could not be made to
run Microsoft's DHCP server reliably. According
to nmap, the primary server is still running the
kernel I installed in December 1997. It's not
unlikely that they haven't been rebooted since I
left Stanford 18 months ago.
My new job is more fun.
Brandeis is small enough to lie below Microsoft's
radar. For the most part, we get to make decisions
based on merit. This means Linux, BSD, or OpenVMS
on the server end, Windows NT on administrative
desktops, and a mix of about 77% Win95/98, 22%
MacOS, and 1% other in the dorms.
Everyone's paychecks come from Oracle for Linux --
pressure to move to Linux came from NT sysadmins
unsatisfied with the reliability of Oracle on NT.
Student records still live in 20-year-old software
on the VAX (*probably* y2k compliant) because no
off-the-shelf solution does everything the old
COBOL hacks do.
> Apple did this, now look how far they've fallen
... just added Linux as a shameless attempt to
> after they stopped seeding educational
> institutions.
Sure, my first machine was an Apple in high school (early-mid 80's) which I learned how to program in BASIC. Never saw an Apple in college. Never did any BASIC in college either. Been using Un*x ever since. Wonder why? Think about going under the hood on an Apple. Geez! Can't find a CLI let alone the frigging source.
> learning Unix from one's elders thing -- my eyes
> actually rolled when I read that
You mean you never heard about the well known mentoring system out there? Most, if not all, Unix types I know, me included, learned the trick of "actually learning Unix" from a more experienced friend or associate. Roll your eyes all you want, _Tradition_ means transmitting the folklore in the oral tradition. Unix is a traditional philosophy. Linux continues in this tradition. You seem unaware of this.
>
> catch a ride on the bandwagon.
Again, Linux is very much a part and a continuation of the Unix tradition. The article indicates this. You must have missed this.
I wish you good learning.
-M
To add to the earlier comment about Penn State and Microsoft, here is the campus newspaper's story:
Microsoft joining Penn State family
The most frighting comment has to be this one:
Steve Stigers (junior-political science) said he thinks the contract probably won't make much of a difference. "Microsoft's the only software that's readily available anyway," he said.
Finkployd
I attend the University of Maryland at Baltimore County, and I know that Microsoft just signed a deal with our school to distribute all microsoft products dirt cheap to faculty and staff.
There's no way MS can kill Linux. Not even at the root level. I got involved with Linux 4 years ago when I was sick of the limited functionality of windows and wanted to try something different. I've installed it on atleast 5 other systems here at school and the people running it _LOVE_ it. State universities may be cash strapped, but when it comes down to it, by the time these people graduating from these Universities get into the work place significantly, Linux will already have a strong foothold, possibly to the point where they're forced to use it. If MS were to give every University free copies of their software for the sake of using only 95/NT they still wouldn't kill Unix. Not only would not every University buy into this plan, but 4 graduating years of students do not compile the entire Information System generation. If MS wanted to succeed at this, we're talking _YEARS_ of influence on a large scale. People over-estimate MS' power to control things. 10 Years from now MS will be releasing its version of MS Linux 2010 complete with source. Unix is not going away anytime soon. Besides, Sun would go down kicking and screaming with this effort, and that'd only pro-long MS' goal.
It'll be a long time - 3-5 years, before Microsoft starts to reap any rewards from this tactic. But they will reap the rewards. The best time to stop this strategy is now - at the beginning. Not four years down the road when we can all see first-hand the results of a unix-deprived IT community.
--
Far be it from me to sound optimistic, but I don't know if an MS check will be enough. It might be enough to infest the web server for the Greek department, or the Fine Arts mailserv, but CS departments are gonna want something stable to work with. I've TA'd for profs in the CS department who don't know a lick of windows programming, and aren't interested, and only about 5% of our post-second-year courses use anything but *n?x.
My university is "standardising on NT" thanks to a big fat exclusive contract with M$. While this might be ok for some people, our research group uses linux/unix/vms for everything. This leads to my ludicrous situation where I have a shiny new PII 450 on my desk running NT, and the only thing I run on it[1] is Digital's eXcursion Xserver to do all my work on a P200 in the next room running Redhat. This is going to change soon, fortunately, but the undergraduate labs etc are Win9x all the way, and I can't wait 'til they try migrating the central mail servers etc to NT...
[1] Well, I use it for Quake and Winamp too, but still, talk about a waste of cpu cycles.
The University of Texas (@austin) has a similar $6mil deal with M$. Students can buy a copy of Office or Visual Studio for $10. Departments can deploy NT to their delight. However, NT seems to be serving one purpose: to run the Windows PC networks. I'm an admin here at the Electrical and Computer Engineering dept, and that's pretty much the only service that NT provides. Unfortunately, university labs are required to have some sort of Windows machines due to the demand professors place on running specialized software (often written by themselves) that runs in such an environment. Compound that with the familiarity most lusers have with Office, and voila. Dependence on M$.
Fortunately, that's as far as it goes. The main services at the university (dialup, mail, news, etc... ) are provided by various unices. In my dept, we rely mostly on Solaris and AIX running the common open source network services suite (sendmail, Apache, ssh, etc...) but are moving to Linux for some services (log server, security, network traffic monitoring). Even my boss, who wanted to spend sickening sums of money about a year ago on NT Terminal Server and new NCD terms that support it, recently decided that we should convert some of our NT workstations (esp. some of the Dell dual Xeons that are going mostly underused) to Linux. Other departments, including RTF, are setting up their NT machines to dual boot to Linux, for those who prefer it. If anything, I think my university is using UNIX more often than ever.
Would you want a midwife to name your baby?--LT
1000 SlashDot sigs
Microsoft is legendary for their anticompetitive practices. In the situations I have seen, they are /delighted/ to leave researchers twisting in the wind once the benefits to Microsoft start to decrease. That's not charity. That's exploitation. And the administrative staff of Generic State University is typically a bunch of burnout slackers who actually believe in a free lunch, so they merrily march into this trap. "TCO through the roof? Too bad, so sad. Hire some MCSEs!"
Microsoft will continue to arouse suspicion in every aspect of its practices until there is substantial evidence that they are doing something besides raping the intellectual capital of the world.
Don't hold your breath.
Remember that what's inside of you doesn't matter because nobody can see it.
I think that UC Berkeley is gonna switch to all NT in the next year or so.
Peer pressure, man.
--
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
Wow, I'm glad you decided to post you're completely uninformed opinion as a root post. We need more people like you!
The comment section is for comments about the story, if you don't read the story, then you can't really comment on it, can you? And no, you were completely wrong in your guess. And I'm sure Microsoft would love to replace bill gates, sure.
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
They had Microsoft titles for 5 bucks each. Windows 98 NT server and workstation, Office Pro 97 for PC and 98 for Mac. The Visual Studio package ($5 per CD, 6 totat CD's) as well as front page, ect... I can't seem to find the webpage right now, the computer store may have left UTSA, I'm not sure. It should be somewhere at www.utsa.edu, if you wanna look around for it.
Here at Marquette, we have to learn how to use 3 or 4 different OSes.
;-)
The main engingeering labs run Windows NT clients and server. We used to have NT on Motorola PowerPC workstations, but switched them to Pentium II systems before last year. The curriculum also swiched over from teaching programming in C to teaching programming in Java.. wonder if that had anything to do with it?!?!?!
Meanwhile, the main Math/Computer Science server is some kind of 2-Processor UltraSparc. "Normally" you would access those through Javastations which have been converted to Linux X-terminals. The main laboratory, and most of the other computer labs around, has both Windows 95 and Macintosh computers available. Overall there seem to be more Windows than Macintosh systems around.
The server that handles all our Web and e-mail services is an Alpha system running Digital Unix. It used to run Linux -- dunno why that was changed. Strangely, they used the FreeBSD "daemon" mascot to advertise the fact.
Finally, the old way to access e-mail was through Pine on a VAX machine. The VAX is still up, but it has only two uses: running Minitab (a statistical analysis program) and hosting students' personal web pages. In some places in the libraries you can still access it through old VT220 terminals.
Confused? I thought so.
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- The server is not interesting. No one cares what operating system the server is running. The server is NOT run by the scientific staff, therefore it is irrelevant.
- The client is not interesting. The client is used for low-brow stuff like e-mail and TeXifying documents. Since e-mail programs and TeX are available for any OS, it is utterly irrelevant.
So then what IS important? Is there anything else except for clients and servers?Strange enough, there is. It is the very small category of computers that are used for Real Work. I mean the computers which are performing the Important Computation, which are running the Experimental Operating System, or the computer cluster running PVM which is doing the new Parallel Algorithm.
That's only a very small part of all the computer systems, but that's the part that actually matters. And nowadays, if it is not running a home-brewn OS, it is increasingly often running Linux.
This small percentage of computers on which real research is done isn't likely to show up in the statistics. However, this is the most important part. It's the part on which people are actually trained.
OK, my 0.05$...
My school just started distributing Microsoft products for the price of the media. $14 to be precise. It included Office 2000 Premium, Visual Studio 6.0 Pro and Windows 98 upgrade. I was quite shocked at the fact that there was Pro and Premium in there. I must admit though that I didn't see what they were up to right away.
-- get on Freenet!
Indiana University (IU) recently announced a $6 million deal that enables the university to freely distribute Windows software to all students and faculty.
I don't understand how this will kill linux. At my University the majority use Windows 9x or NT and only those in the know, if you will, are using unix/linux. Free Windows software isn't something that students cannot get at a million warez sites on the web. The people I see benefiting from this are college computer labs which are typically mostly windows machines and really could benefit from free version of MS Office and friends.
I really do not see any science or math departments giving up their stable unix/linux for untrustworthy nt. What I forsee is that Universities will have more machines running free linux and (now equally free) nt and not so many costly Unix variants.
Almost everything at NAIT was M$ from our C++ compilers to our advanced Networking course (Win NT, Haw!). The only respite I had was that we learned JAVA (with JDK 1.1.7B & PFE) and in our beginner's networking class we learned NetWare. Living in a MicroSocentric world was fun, but restricting. I have no UNIX / Linux skills and my only Mac experiance is from my older Apple lovin' days.
Sigh.
crazy dynamite monkey
When I started at Emory I got a shell account on a Unix (solaris) server cluster and a "LearnLink" account (basically a cute gui messaging system running on NT server). Nowadays they're "encouraging" Freshman to use only the NT system. These klunkers crash every week, and are always slow. Freshman ask me how I manage to always have access to my e-mail. "Ahh young one, ready yourself for the mysteries of telnet..."
My CS201 class which focuses on Object Oriented programming and GUIs.
This year we started classes with a surprise from our buddy M$, free software! Every student got NT workstation 4 and Visual Studio. The Dept got a crate of NT servers. I thought to myself, Hmm how generous, i even considered installing NT so i could use it. Then I realized that the curiculum had changed over the summer, Object oriented programming in C++ and Java is now OO programming in MFC (Microsoft foundation classes) this isn't anti-linux but we all know how Mr Gates loves Java...
coincidence? you tell me.
--------------------- Turn evil by smiling.
At least the Helsinki University of Technology Computing Centre makes their opinion pretty clear.
About a year or so ago UAA (U of Alaska, Anchorage) made a similer deal with M$ (and pepsi ;-) but I havn't really seen the effects. The CS dept still uses Digital Unix, same with the MIS dept at the School of Busisness. At the library ,where i work as a part time network tech, we have a pair of old netware servers and two linux servers (including a shiny new rack mount unit from Dell, of course the racks havn't arrived yet and the new server is sitting in a chair in a coworkers office...) We use netware for file and print sharing (and will continue to until NDS is fully ported to linux) and the linux boxes for everything else. We are currently using NT (blah) for the public access computers because 1) a few databases we serve up require a winblows client 2) NT is sorta sercure/stable compared to 95/98. Though we do use Novell's application launcher for the system shell ;-) Fortunately all of our databases will be webbased within the next year and we can move the public machines to Linux/X.
We have also resisted a few attempts to put NT on the back end mostly by finding a better OSS/Linux solution faster than a NT box could be ordered! As long as our users get the services they ask for they are happy (and so is the brass, esp when we do it w/out asking for more $$$)
"The only difference between me and a madman is that I am not mad" - Salvador Dali
"Listen: We are here on Earth to fart around. Don't let anybody tell you any different!" - Kurt Vonnegut
Sorry dude, but yep, even server software!
My local Technical college staff have been assimilated by M$ in just this fashion.
They don't even think it is a problem that they had to write a script to reboot their NT Servers every Sunday afternoon just so that they can get a few weekdays uptime before they start to fall over.
The same people even think that it's fine to wait for service packs - just to fix a bug that really should not have been in a commercial product anyway. And they are being taught that it's ok to have to buy additional funcionality in the form of a "resource kit" just to get the features the O/S should have had in the first place.
It sounds like something Monty Python would have come up with, but it's true.
I find this truly disturbing, don't you?
I don't know if anyone else out there is having this happen at their campus, but, at mine, Microsoft is doing something very similar to what they did to Netscape -- they are (for all intents and purposes) giving away their software. Yes, that's right folks, for only $20 you can go down to the bookstore and rent Office, Visual X++, NT, whatever.
What I find particularly alarming about this whole thing, and what subsequently irks me the most, is that Microsoft is essentially "dumping," and there is not even a peep about it at school. It was like, one day I walked into the bookstore's CS section, and there it was: a wall full of "rental" CDs. A good friend of mine who works in the bookstore was just as amazed as I was.
Given that the California CSU Technology Initiative (or whatever it was dubbed) was aborted, I find it very interesting that Microsoft has cleverly found a way around the whole mess. And moreover, they have done it in such a way that is not attracting any attention -- at least at my school.
Welcome class, this is CS666, Advanced Operating Systems Internals. Oh wait. That's right. We switched to MS. No source to look at anymore. OK, remember class if it doesn't work, you don't need to know why, just call MS tech support. And when it does work, you don't need to know how it does either. That's proprietery. Welp, look at that. 58 secnods. I guess that's it for the entire semester. Good luck on the final tomorrow and then we'll just skip the next 10 weeks.
So much for Microsoft's vaunted 'Freedom to Innovate'.
Maybe Microsoft wants more smart people to help them innovate better products. But I doubt it.
--
QDMerge 0.21!
how to invest, a novice's guide
dude, 16 year olds don't buy software at all. Anyone with any technical skill is just going to 'aquire' the stuff :).
I'd bet that anyone with the technical skills to install (or even know about) Linux could probably get all the CSS software they wanted for the same cost...
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
two years ago, my girlfriend's school had the typical university setup - unix serverside, clients using pine or (if they're a little savvy) pop servers to get their mail.
that summer they switched to NT and everyone *had* to use microsoft exchange to get mail. this didn't bother many people that much - it's a pretty artsy-fartsy school and it's something like 80% girls. not a high geek factor. other than the hassle of setting it up, people liked the pretty pictures.
but then came the crashes. at least once a month the mail server would go down and nobody would be able to send or receive mail. sometimes this would happen two or three times a week - one of the most common conversations i had with my girlfriend was:
"did you get my email?"
"no.."
"damn it, tania's mail is broken too.. mail servers must be down. AGAIN."
so there was widespread dissatisfaction and anger at NT. but - and this is the important part - because NT is 'better supported, runs faster, fud fud fud' they're not switching back. so 4 years from now almost no one will remember how much more reliable the network was when it wasn't NT, but it will be too late to switch back. and then, if they like, microsoft can switch to a more costly licensing scheme.
this entire thing is scary and ugly.. but it's also the move of a company that is starting to seriously worry about its own superiority. things will only get uglier.
I work for an educational institution. I can purchase a copy of NT Server for somewhere around 30-50 bucks via a special agreement with Microsoft. Suprisingly, we don't but many copies of NT still. Why? It sucks, and doesn't have the power and stability that UNIX has. In fact, we purchased more copies of NT Server than we're using. Why don't I use it at home, or on my laptop, since we have copies? Because NT sucks...Linux is free and doesn't suck. In short, my point is, that at any price, NT sucks. NT sucks, get it?
I know about Windows NT Server 4.0 vs Unix but it would be handy to have something targeted to this situation. A study that showed a realistic comparison of support costs, network usage, security issues, and hardware costs between Windows and Unix.
Why?
So that when Microsoft wants to donate to a university with strings attached, people can evaluate whether or not the Microsoft solution with the handout included will cost more than a Unix solution. If it (as it often will) does then it becomes much easier to make the argument that the offer is not worthwhile.
Otherwise cash in hand is a very hard thing to argue with...
Cheers,
Ben
My usual seat in the cluetrain is at A HREF="http://pub4.ezboard.com/biwethey.ht