Contact your school's CIO. Explain your problems. Go to the Student Government. Be prepared to explain why they should care. If you have to, run for a Senator position and bitch.
That's exactly what I did. My University was going to implement a number of rather Draconian Microsoft solutions. As the College of Sciences Rep, I got invited to serve on committees that decided these things, including the IT Budget Committee. Later, I served on the search committee for our new CIO. Each candidate that we interviewed got grilled on Open Source.
IT has the end-user in mind. In our case, it was the History Professor, the Business Student, and the departmental admin associate. Computer Science, Math, and Physics decided to go off and play by themselves. If all we're going to do is call IT incompetent and clueless, is it any wonder that they don't take any of our computing requirements into consideration?
Anyone with enough willpower, money, or net.savvyness can gain access to such information.
The only people who are being denied access to this information are student researchers and the general public. Which is just as well, seeing as how students and the general public comprise the largest group of terrorists: MP3 pirates! Arr!
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Contact your school's CIO. Explain your problems. Go to the Student Government. Be prepared to explain why they should care. If you have to, run for a Senator position and bitch.
That's exactly what I did. My University was going to implement a number of rather Draconian Microsoft solutions. As the College of Sciences Rep, I got invited to serve on committees that decided these things, including the IT Budget Committee. Later, I served on the search committee for our new CIO. Each candidate that we interviewed got grilled on Open Source.
IT has the end-user in mind. In our case, it was the History Professor, the Business Student, and the departmental admin associate. Computer Science, Math, and Physics decided to go off and play by themselves. If all we're going to do is call IT incompetent and clueless, is it any wonder that they don't take any of our computing requirements into consideration?
Anyone with enough willpower, money, or net.savvyness can gain access to such information.
The only people who are being denied access to this information are student researchers and the general public. Which is just as well, seeing as how students and the general public comprise the largest group of terrorists: MP3 pirates! Arr!