Today, the technology has improved, and prices for small, 15-inch displays have dipped to about $300. That low price point makes sleek flat-panels a viable alternative to standard CRT monitors, whose technology has undergone few fundamental changes since Philo Farnsworth patented television in 1930.
Well, only color, digital, non-interlaced, VGA, Trinitron, on-screen controls, power savings, almost-perfect flatness... This nineteen-incher doesn't bear much in common with the bulbous b&w RCA Dad picked up from Woolworth's on the way back from the war.
I mean, whatever. It's just, you gotta love the offhanded style of these semi-conscious mass-market tech reviewers.
The chances of deformation in assisted reproduction in humans is four per cent, though in women aged over 40 it is six per cent.
"Data, what is the likelihood of deformation if we start cloning the crew?"
"Deformations will occur in exactly 4.01876 per cent of the yielded population."
"Commander Data, when you say 'exactly', do you mean that the figure is precise to the limits of your capability?"
"No, Captain, the rest are zeroes. I have arbitrary floating point capabilities. Seven digits...<huff>...I mean, really Captain."
"OK, sorry. Well, you realize that we're dealing with whole unit quantities here, so to achieve that kind of precise ratio... I mean, say we only cloned 100 people. How are you going to get that zero-point-whatever fraction you're talking about?"
"Yes, Captain, I am aware of your human concept of 'integer math.' For your information, I am also capable of predicting exactly how many crewmembers we will clone."
"Um, alright, whatever. Seems like a lot. Warp speed on my command."
Yes, not only does Slashdot NOT provide a list of all users' e-mail addresses in a conveniently downloadable text file, but the addresses, which you have to dig out manually one-by-one, are obfuscated for "spam-protection". What does this mean? It means that a company that wants to advertise its great products to new customers will have a hard time, because it can't send out the advertisements! And why? Because Slashdot refuses to share its data in an open-source manner!
There should be a Weak/Impotent Troll modifier in addition to the usual Troll, the latter of which is sometimes a compliment. Or maybe it already exists as Offtopic.
Of course what we're talking about in this case is not *embronic* stem cells but bone marrow from the the boy's own body. So there not really any moral question in that regard.
Yes, I am aware. But without a moral question, what's the purpose of 181 slashdot comments? I was trying to be relevant.
If the knowedge is available to help someone, as rare as SCIDS is, shouldn't we just do it?
Yes, this is good news.
But why insist on any moral imperative at all? The truth is that being sick sucks, why don't we show a little compassion?
I believe I did show a lot of compassion by suggesting that we take seriously the hundreds of thousands of cases of preventable diseases. Sorry that this was not clear.
He said that even if they took all that into account, he doesn't think there could have been any way to design the buildings to withstand that. The fact that the structures stood as long as they did is actually a testament to the good overall design (so the program said, anyway).
Yes, it's clearly the case that the buildings performed well. The airliners punched huge holes in the outside frame and yet the frame did not collapse.
As we all know, the heat of the fire did them in, because it melted the steel. Steel is required to be fireproofed. However, by the time the WTC was constructed, asbestos had been banned, and the alternative fireproofing material had a lower melting point.
Thus, it has been suggested to me that asbestos may have been able to save the towers. Take that as you may.
Personally, I'm mystified as to why there is no method for applying asbestos in a non-carcinogenic manner. Asbestos is an inert rock. Grinding it up into dust is what causes cancer.
They cured the kid's disease with stem cells. Great. What else can stem cells do? I'm not entirely sure I care.
I'm not a religious moralist, and I find the pro-life side of the embryonic stem cell debate disturbing. However, every once in a while, the views of liberals converge with those of religious conservatives - for example, with Catholics on the death penalty. I think this may be one of those cases.
The supposedly liberal view on stem cells is that we have a moral imperative to cure obscure diseases. We can, therefore we must. Well, I'm not impressed with that logic. It's not clear that the cures will be widely available, or that stem cell research won't accelerate the pace of frankenstein genetics experiments.
Meanwhile, most of the disease in this country is self-inflicted. Heart disease, lung cancer, alcoholism, obesity. A few public policy initiatives would do much more for public health than any stem cells would.
There's a corporate power-play going on here with regards to the information in these stem cells. Miracle cures are the carrot on the stick. Public policy is being ignored.
Hype? maybe 5years ago it was hype man! But i work in VoIP and its gonna happen soon.. all the pieces are falling in place...
OK, I apologize for my sarcastic tone. Yes, it's true, there is competition in the marketplace. I can get local phone service from my cable company or third-party provider.
But the basis for my reply is that your post represents an ideal whose flaws are already becoming apparent.
For one, IP is not known for its reliability or ease of use. Grandma doesn't want to check the lights on her cable modem every time the phone goes out. If you work in VoIP, you must know that the phone company's uptime standard for central switches is something like 99.99999%. Try doing that with ethernet.
Second, in a hyper-competitive marketplace, there's no incentive for companies to offer a flat-price, easy-to-understand service plan. I tried a third-party local calling plan, and I realized shortly after I signed on that I was getting raped. Admittedly, dial-arounds save my ass on long distance, but dial-arounds generally don't market themselves. Notice that the ones who do (10-10-220) have the worst rates. You company will certainly market itself.
Third, there's no incentive for the big networks to open the marketplace to third-party providers. Witness DSL.
You can roll out VoIP tomorrow, but it will still take 10-15 years before VoIP is $20.00/mo with ~100% uptime and universal coverage. Building a utility takes time and patience that the business community does not have. Your bosses are looking at the IPO, and behemoths like Verizon are looking to keep you out of the market. Nobody outside of engineering actually wants to see this work.
I have a cynical view, but I think the recent history of tech business supports it.
I noticed a few days ago, that Slashdot looks "aquatic" every time there is an osx story. Does anyone know who did this look and how? It looks by far better than the original.
No, it does not look better. It looks the SAME. There are still rounded corners, three columns, and massive clutter - all hallmarks of the inept web designer.
The only difference is gray lines, fading, and a metal-polish filter. Arbitrary post-processing. Your mac-addled brain can't tell the difference.
I love it how, in every new Apple story on/., some people are still surprised at the cute Aqua-themed window widgets. How long since apple.slashdot.org launched? A month? How long can we keep this up?
I love apple.slashdot.org. It's like, "If you thought Slashdot was dumb, get ready for APPLE slashdot!" Who thinks this stuff up anyway?
...but regardless, this makes my Mac OS X experience complete.
Wow, Diablo II on a Mac. You are a tool.
Let me summarize your life for you:
1. Pound big, fat mouse button. 2. Wait for super armor/tower shield/perfect diamond. 3. Pound button some more.
Most people use all ten of their fingers. Congratulations, you've learned how to use one. Upgrade to Windows, maybe you can exercise a second one. But first make sure to get that tower shield.
My friends say that "Apple would rather do it right than do it fast", since they use the Risc chip that is more modern design(?).
The RISC design isn't keeping up with the times. In the 1980's, it was a great idea to simplify chip design - hence RISC. But today's PC chips are more complex than ever, and faster as a result.
RISC makes sense for CHEAP chips like the ones in a game console or TiVo. But on the high-end, Intel/AMD have been beating the hell out of RISC for five years now.
I do not like Windows XP. It is slow and made by criminals.
Well guess what, Apple's monopolistic tendencies are just as bad. They sell computers with ridiculous markups, severely limit third-party hardware, and arbitrarily force their customers to upgrade (source: www.pbs.org/cringely)
Apple's philosophy is to sell exclusively to the incompetent user. Thus, they can manipulate their user base even worse than Microsoft does, and they control their market segment even more tightly.
Their new operating system - OS X - is based on tight, fast BSD code and yet requires 192Mb to run. They do not do things "right." They do things however they want, and then paint the computers different colors.
For all we know we will have nanites in 100 years (or less) contructing a radio telescope antenna of astronomical proportions from bucky tubes with the information collected examined by a worldwide distributed computing system. You have to look at the entire sphere of the advancement of science.
I'd love to, but my boss keeps telling me, "Put the grill-side of the hamburger FACE-UP on the bun."
He doesn't care about space telescopes, neither do the customers. But at $6/hr, I will eventually save up for a linux cluster and programming classes, which will help the distributed computing effort quite a bit.
If they can combine the story of the books with the depth of their Dune series, this could be a great watch.
Just because it was six hours long doesn't mean it was deep. They threw in a generous amount of plot to satisfy the soap opera audience, and they cheesed pretty much everything else.
The casting of Paul Atreides was particuarly galling. It was like, "OK, we need to cast a military hero of mythic stature. Let's cast around Hollywood for the most gay and ineffectual actor we can find."
Sci-Fi channel is crap that my granny of a mom watches. Cleopatra was the only thing they had going in recent memory.
Everything is becoming a service.. IP networking, Phone Connectivity. Video(cable tv). What does this mean? Simply you are going to see companies soon competing for the right to bring bandwith to your door. While the services you choose can be offered by anyone.
I can't believe you got modded up twice for repeating hype from five years ago.
Open your door, take a look outside. The rosy worldview you have proposed has long since failed to come about.
I think that Microsoft should open-source Windows itself. It's hard to deny that Windows is a monopoly standard, so how can they argue that protecting the code is vital to competitive interests?
Windows is a standard. Standards are open. The only "intellectual property" in Windows are the secret code hooks used to keep Microsoft's applications performing slightly better than their competitors'. That's leveraging monopoly power, and it's illegal.
XP boots in 1/2 to 1/3 the time of MDK8.2 for me, doesn't crash, and XP's thumbnailing file browser is pretty zippy - and it's approximately 40-50 times faster than Nautilus.
Hey, I didn't compare it to anything. I was just surprised to find that in a network that includes 100Mhz NIC's, 264Mhz disk controllers, and a 1200Mhz CPU running Win2k, it was the CPU that was the bottleneck.
Just like Linux screws up graphical ops, only M$ can screw up disk/network ops that badly.
This assesses singing skill mathematically," Kitamura said.
Great. Now, if we assess everything mathematically, we'll eventually live in a perfect world, right? I don't see any flaws in this logic, do you?
If I could get a mathematician to rate my movies for me, cook my food and write my laws for me, I'd really be living the high life. Mathematicians are definitely God's most perfect creatures.
Interesting. This could be similar to Ozzy or D&D getting sued for teen suicides, or it could be more like the cigarette analogy they make in the article.
Personally, I believe that video games are being created today with an addictive component designed in from the start.
I tried Diablo II by Blizzard, and the game literally amounted to nothing more than an attractive new way to roll dice. You click on a monster, it dies, maybe you get a half-decent item from it, and repeat. As the woman in the article said, you either die, go insane, or quit. You definitely never win.
The issue is not that video games are addictive. It is whether the companies are leveraging and spreading the addiction for their own profits. That is the cigarette analogy, and I can see how it would apply.
What exactly is 2.4Ghz supposed to do for me? I bought a 1.2Ghz athlon last year, and the only time the processor hits peak load is when the M$_OS is copying files. I certainly don't need 1.2 Ghz for games, or for apps.
Maybe a 2.4Ghz processor will allow the next version of the M$_OS to log me on, or to boot up? M$_OS seems to need all the power it can find.
Fuck Iomega. Zip disks have been stable in price since Kurt Cobain was alive and kicking - ten cents a megabyte, last and every time I checked. Zip disks were slow and expensive even when they were introduced.
Remember the parallel port drive? That piece of trash was wasting my time way back before I had sideburns. Remember 2.8M floppies? Backwards-compatible 100Mb floppies? They're gone, and the parallel port Iomega drive lives on.
Now they're coming out with a storage server. What are they supposed to be, some sort of market leader in storage solutions? Give me a break. This company has been nothing but marketing hype from day one.
I don't think Microsoft will have a lot of success. I think you will find that the cookie-cutter colleges that tend to produce Microsoft Programming clones will switch to this, but I doubt a lot of the major colleges will do a complete switch.
Well, MIT has already switched a lot of its major programming courses to Java. Most colleges have, which indicates that colleges will gladly outsource to a corporation. Granted, Java came with a lot of open-standards hype, but on the other hand, Microsoft is THE standard.
Phil Greenspun's MIT course in web programming has already featured.NET projects, and most of the kids in the course couldn't wait to get their hands on it.
Furthermore, Hal Abelson, co-author of SICP and one of MIT's most revered comp sci professors, is a firm believer in.NET. I don't know why, but he is...he's had his grad students working on.NET projects since last fall.
The profs like it, and the kids like it...why shouldn't Microsoft succeed?
Slashdot Mirror
Today, the technology has improved, and prices for small, 15-inch displays have dipped to about $300. That low price point makes sleek flat-panels a viable alternative to standard CRT monitors, whose technology has undergone few fundamental changes since Philo Farnsworth patented television in 1930.
Well, only color, digital, non-interlaced, VGA, Trinitron, on-screen controls, power savings, almost-perfect flatness... This nineteen-incher doesn't bear much in common with the bulbous b&w RCA Dad picked up from Woolworth's on the way back from the war.
I mean, whatever. It's just, you gotta love the offhanded style of these semi-conscious mass-market tech reviewers.
The chances of deformation in assisted reproduction in humans is four per cent, though in women aged over 40 it is six per cent.
"Data, what is the likelihood of deformation if we start cloning the crew?"
"Deformations will occur in exactly 4.01876 per cent of the yielded population."
"Commander Data, when you say 'exactly', do you mean that the figure is precise to the limits of your capability?"
"No, Captain, the rest are zeroes. I have arbitrary floating point capabilities. Seven digits...<huff>...I mean, really Captain."
"OK, sorry. Well, you realize that we're dealing with whole unit quantities here, so to achieve that kind of precise ratio... I mean, say we only cloned 100 people. How are you going to get that zero-point-whatever fraction you're talking about?"
"Yes, Captain, I am aware of your human concept of 'integer math.' For your information, I am also capable of predicting exactly how many crewmembers we will clone."
"Um, alright, whatever. Seems like a lot. Warp speed on my command."
Yes, not only does Slashdot NOT provide a list of all users' e-mail addresses in a conveniently downloadable text file, but the addresses, which you have to dig out manually one-by-one, are obfuscated for "spam-protection". What does this mean? It means that a company that wants to advertise its great products to new customers will have a hard time, because it can't send out the advertisements! And why? Because Slashdot refuses to share its data in an open-source manner!
There should be a Weak/Impotent Troll modifier in addition to the usual Troll, the latter of which is sometimes a compliment. Or maybe it already exists as Offtopic.
Of course what we're talking about in this case is not *embronic* stem cells but bone marrow from the the boy's own body. So there not really any moral question in that regard.
Yes, I am aware. But without a moral question, what's the purpose of 181 slashdot comments? I was trying to be relevant.
If the knowedge is available to help someone, as rare as SCIDS is, shouldn't we just do it?
Yes, this is good news.
But why insist on any moral imperative at all? The truth is that being sick sucks, why don't we show a little compassion?
I believe I did show a lot of compassion by suggesting that we take seriously the hundreds of thousands of cases of preventable diseases. Sorry that this was not clear.
He said that even if they took all that into account, he doesn't think there could have been any way to design the buildings to withstand that. The fact that the structures stood as long as they did is actually a testament to the good overall design (so the program said, anyway).
Yes, it's clearly the case that the buildings performed well. The airliners punched huge holes in the outside frame and yet the frame did not collapse.
As we all know, the heat of the fire did them in, because it melted the steel. Steel is required to be fireproofed. However, by the time the WTC was constructed, asbestos had been banned, and the alternative fireproofing material had a lower melting point.
Thus, it has been suggested to me that asbestos may have been able to save the towers. Take that as you may.
Personally, I'm mystified as to why there is no method for applying asbestos in a non-carcinogenic manner. Asbestos is an inert rock. Grinding it up into dust is what causes cancer.
They cured the kid's disease with stem cells. Great. What else can stem cells do? I'm not entirely sure I care.
I'm not a religious moralist, and I find the pro-life side of the embryonic stem cell debate disturbing. However, every once in a while, the views of liberals converge with those of religious conservatives - for example, with Catholics on the death penalty. I think this may be one of those cases.
The supposedly liberal view on stem cells is that we have a moral imperative to cure obscure diseases. We can, therefore we must. Well, I'm not impressed with that logic. It's not clear that the cures will be widely available, or that stem cell research won't accelerate the pace of frankenstein genetics experiments.
Meanwhile, most of the disease in this country is self-inflicted. Heart disease, lung cancer, alcoholism, obesity. A few public policy initiatives would do much more for public health than any stem cells would.
There's a corporate power-play going on here with regards to the information in these stem cells. Miracle cures are the carrot on the stick. Public policy is being ignored.
Hype? maybe 5years ago it was hype man! But i work in VoIP and its gonna happen soon.. all the pieces are falling in place...
OK, I apologize for my sarcastic tone. Yes, it's true, there is competition in the marketplace. I can get local phone service from my cable company or third-party provider.
But the basis for my reply is that your post represents an ideal whose flaws are already becoming apparent.
For one, IP is not known for its reliability or ease of use. Grandma doesn't want to check the lights on her cable modem every time the phone goes out. If you work in VoIP, you must know that the phone company's uptime standard for central switches is something like 99.99999%. Try doing that with ethernet.
Second, in a hyper-competitive marketplace, there's no incentive for companies to offer a flat-price, easy-to-understand service plan. I tried a third-party local calling plan, and I realized shortly after I signed on that I was getting raped. Admittedly, dial-arounds save my ass on long distance, but dial-arounds generally don't market themselves. Notice that the ones who do (10-10-220) have the worst rates. You company will certainly market itself.
Third, there's no incentive for the big networks to open the marketplace to third-party providers. Witness DSL.
You can roll out VoIP tomorrow, but it will still take 10-15 years before VoIP is $20.00/mo with ~100% uptime and universal coverage. Building a utility takes time and patience that the business community does not have. Your bosses are looking at the IPO, and behemoths like Verizon are looking to keep you out of the market. Nobody outside of engineering actually wants to see this work.
I have a cynical view, but I think the recent history of tech business supports it.
I noticed a few days ago, that Slashdot looks "aquatic" every time there is an osx story.
Does anyone know who did this look and how?
It looks by far better than the original.
No, it does not look better. It looks the SAME. There are still rounded corners, three columns, and massive clutter - all hallmarks of the inept web designer.
The only difference is gray lines, fading, and a metal-polish filter. Arbitrary post-processing. Your mac-addled brain can't tell the difference.
Maybe I'm in the minority, but as soon as I started using OSX, I was searching the web for GUI themes to get rid of the "Aqua look".
No, you're not in the minority. Just a minority among people who own apples.
I love it how, in every new Apple story on /., some people are still surprised at the cute Aqua-themed window widgets. How long since apple.slashdot.org launched? A month? How long can we keep this up?
I love apple.slashdot.org. It's like, "If you thought Slashdot was dumb, get ready for APPLE slashdot!" Who thinks this stuff up anyway?
While you're at it, can we get a LINUX Slashdot?
...but regardless, this makes my Mac OS X experience complete.
Wow, Diablo II on a Mac. You are a tool.
Let me summarize your life for you:
1. Pound big, fat mouse button.
2. Wait for super armor/tower shield/perfect diamond.
3. Pound button some more.
Most people use all ten of their fingers. Congratulations, you've learned how to use one. Upgrade to Windows, maybe you can exercise a second one. But first make sure to get that tower shield.
My friends say that "Apple would rather do it right than do it fast", since they use the Risc chip that is more modern design(?).
The RISC design isn't keeping up with the times. In the 1980's, it was a great idea to simplify chip design - hence RISC. But today's PC chips are more complex than ever, and faster as a result.
RISC makes sense for CHEAP chips like the ones in a game console or TiVo. But on the high-end, Intel/AMD have been beating the hell out of RISC for five years now.
I do not like Windows XP. It is slow and made by criminals.
Well guess what, Apple's monopolistic tendencies are just as bad. They sell computers with ridiculous markups, severely limit third-party hardware, and arbitrarily force their customers to upgrade (source: www.pbs.org/cringely)
Apple's philosophy is to sell exclusively to the incompetent user. Thus, they can manipulate their user base even worse than Microsoft does, and they control their market segment even more tightly.
Their new operating system - OS X - is based on tight, fast BSD code and yet requires 192Mb to run. They do not do things "right." They do things however they want, and then paint the computers different colors.
You get one point for "microlensing," one point for "parallax/wobbly star" and one point for IIRC.
Can I have mod points now?
For all we know we will have nanites in 100 years (or less) contructing a radio telescope antenna of astronomical proportions from bucky tubes with the information collected examined by a worldwide distributed computing system. You have to look at the entire sphere of the advancement of science.
I'd love to, but my boss keeps telling me, "Put the grill-side of the hamburger FACE-UP on the bun."
He doesn't care about space telescopes, neither do the customers. But at $6/hr, I will eventually save up for a linux cluster and programming classes, which will help the distributed computing effort quite a bit.
I like how he has a Van Gogh in the photo. This guy hasn't advanced his art tastes since his teen years.
Home beer brewing and sea kayaking...ooh. Exciting guy.
Oh yeah, and he works at Caltech.
Was there supposed to be something earth-like in this article? I didn't see it.
If they can combine the story of the books with the depth of their Dune series, this could be a great watch.
Just because it was six hours long doesn't mean it was deep. They threw in a generous amount of plot to satisfy the soap opera audience, and they cheesed pretty much everything else.
The casting of Paul Atreides was particuarly galling. It was like, "OK, we need to cast a military hero of mythic stature. Let's cast around Hollywood for the most gay and ineffectual actor we can find."
Sci-Fi channel is crap that my granny of a mom watches. Cleopatra was the only thing they had going in recent memory.
Everything is becoming a service.. IP networking, Phone Connectivity. Video(cable tv). What does this mean? Simply you are going to see companies soon competing for the right to bring bandwith to your door. While the services you choose can be offered by anyone.
I can't believe you got modded up twice for repeating hype from five years ago.
Open your door, take a look outside. The rosy worldview you have proposed has long since failed to come about.
I think that Microsoft should open-source Windows itself. It's hard to deny that Windows is a monopoly standard, so how can they argue that protecting the code is vital to competitive interests?
Windows is a standard. Standards are open. The only "intellectual property" in Windows are the secret code hooks used to keep Microsoft's applications performing slightly better than their competitors'. That's leveraging monopoly power, and it's illegal.
XP boots in 1/2 to 1/3 the time of MDK8.2 for me, doesn't crash, and XP's thumbnailing file browser is pretty zippy - and it's approximately 40-50 times faster than Nautilus.
Hey, I didn't compare it to anything. I was just surprised to find that in a network that includes 100Mhz NIC's, 264Mhz disk controllers, and a 1200Mhz CPU running Win2k, it was the CPU that was the bottleneck.
Just like Linux screws up graphical ops, only M$ can screw up disk/network ops that badly.
This assesses singing skill mathematically," Kitamura said.
Great. Now, if we assess everything mathematically, we'll eventually live in a perfect world, right? I don't see any flaws in this logic, do you?
If I could get a mathematician to rate my movies for me, cook my food and write my laws for me, I'd really be living the high life. Mathematicians are definitely God's most perfect creatures.
Now compare this to the West, where standards of wealth for the average citizen have been improving for over a century.
INCORRECT. Real wages have been stagnant since 1972.
Interesting. This could be similar to Ozzy or D&D getting sued for teen suicides, or it could be more like the cigarette analogy they make in the article.
Personally, I believe that video games are being created today with an addictive component designed in from the start.
I tried Diablo II by Blizzard, and the game literally amounted to nothing more than an attractive new way to roll dice. You click on a monster, it dies, maybe you get a half-decent item from it, and repeat. As the woman in the article said, you either die, go insane, or quit. You definitely never win.
The issue is not that video games are addictive. It is whether the companies are leveraging and spreading the addiction for their own profits. That is the cigarette analogy, and I can see how it would apply.
What exactly is 2.4Ghz supposed to do for me? I bought a 1.2Ghz athlon last year, and the only time the processor hits peak load is when the M$_OS is copying files. I certainly don't need 1.2 Ghz for games, or for apps.
Maybe a 2.4Ghz processor will allow the next version of the M$_OS to log me on, or to boot up? M$_OS seems to need all the power it can find.
Fuck Iomega. Zip disks have been stable in price since Kurt Cobain was alive and kicking - ten cents a megabyte, last and every time I checked. Zip disks were slow and expensive even when they were introduced.
Remember the parallel port drive? That piece of trash was wasting my time way back before I had sideburns. Remember 2.8M floppies? Backwards-compatible 100Mb floppies? They're gone, and the parallel port Iomega drive lives on.
Now they're coming out with a storage server. What are they supposed to be, some sort of market leader in storage solutions? Give me a break. This company has been nothing but marketing hype from day one.
I don't think Microsoft will have a lot of success. I think you will find that the cookie-cutter colleges that tend to produce Microsoft Programming clones will switch to this, but I doubt a lot of the major colleges will do a complete switch.
.NET projects, and most of the kids in the course couldn't wait to get their hands on it.
.NET. I don't know why, but he is...he's had his grad students working on .NET projects since last fall.
Well, MIT has already switched a lot of its major programming courses to Java. Most colleges have, which indicates that colleges will gladly outsource to a corporation. Granted, Java came with a lot of open-standards hype, but on the other hand, Microsoft is THE standard.
Phil Greenspun's MIT course in web programming has already featured
Furthermore, Hal Abelson, co-author of SICP and one of MIT's most revered comp sci professors, is a firm believer in
The profs like it, and the kids like it...why shouldn't Microsoft succeed?