To be clear: students won't have to switch to Windows to read their mail. They'd have to switch to Windows to have a supported desktop email client. Not quite as severe, but certainly inconvenient. I can't switch to Windows; my department is very Mac-centric and they provide my laptop. I guess if I got a copy of Windows I could install it now that they're Intel based, but it's better for my work when I'm on the system the department and software we use prefers, and I prefer Mac OS X to Windows personally anyway.
Also, while it would be nice to just refuse to use that address, it's simply not practical to practice. Official University information is sent to it, including communication from professors to their classes, and that system won't change. There is no way I know of to set up an auto-reply on the Windows Live Mail system--I checked the options with my throwaway Hotmail. (And some emails are sent by automated systems that won't change, or from lists automatically populated by student email addresses.) While it would be possible to move away from that email for the most part, you would still have to check it; the frequency would depend on the tendencies of your particular classes at the moment to communicate messages through email.
...I do know they run WebCT, but I don't know much about it, though I hear grumbling from those who have to use it now and again.
I'm not in the CS department anymore, but they phased out the internal email system for CS students a while ago, keeping it only for faculty, since all students had a University provided email anyway. I don't know how many other departments might have internal mail.
Even that wouldn't solve everyone's problem--people are asking how to set up this account with their Outlook and they can't, even though both Windows Live Mail and Outlook are Microsoft products and they're on a Windows system.
Ugh. At least I know the faculty is just as inconvenienced as we are. None of my professors are going to enjoy the lack of POP3.
That might not be true--the staff and faculty are being moved to an MS Exchange server, not Windows Live Mail, and MS Exchange supports POP if set up properly (to my understanding). In any case, they're not going to be on WLM. It's only student emails being migrated.
We're trying our utmost hardest to figure that out, believe me. I've been lead to understand that the SCAC was part of this decision process. They are set out in the student association's rules to:
The Student Computing Advisory Committee (SCAC) shall make recommendations to the Vice Provost for Outreach and Technologies on policies and procedures related to student computing technology. These may include any of the following actions: review of operations, budgets, services, and needs for student computing; prioritizing financial expenditures; and assisting in the development of long-term planning.
However, we have gotten a response back from the faculty co-chair of the SCAC saying that they last met in Spring 2006 and were not involved with the implementation, and suggested I contact the student co-chair.
The concerns about malware are fringe and would be a non-issue (for me) entirely if we could use our regular clients and people had the option to use another desktop client. Our ITS department is always very pro-active about security, with regular emails encouraging people to try and secure their computers.
As for your slurs towards my personal affairs, I'm not running Linux right now, although in the future I'm planning to get back into that titillating groove, and I live in an apartment, 'cause I like cooking my own food and keeping pets.
Do you know whether Windows Live Mail reserves that right? Part of the reason WLM was chosen over Google Apps at the time was because of the advertising. However, it was not the only reason. (I don't know whether Google actually told them that or whether they were just gleaning things from the website.)
We have been writing letters and commenting on their news article about it. We also have flyers up so that people can print out their own and post them on bulletin boards, and have done posting ourselves as well. I'll get in touch with my colleagues and see if anyone's contacted the paper's editors on doing another story that talks about the other side of the migration, as well.
Just so you don't think us totally lazy, we did figure out guides and instructions up for interfacing with Thunderbird before I posted this, but I was hoping there would be other methods, as well, because not all of us use Thunderbird. Eudora, Apple Mail, and even Outlook are other mail clients that people might be using.
Notice the last: you cannot forward your email. You cannot forward your email.
I should note that this policy is not Microsoft's fault, or at least their lack of it wouldn't have affected the choice anyway, because our email policy made in 2003 decided that too many people were missing important University emails when they forwarded because of spam filters and outages out of the University's control. Therefore, students can't forward their email. I can understand that, but it adds a layer onto our problems, because we can't set up our own email accounts and simply have our mail forwarded. (Although this change does break the policy a little--it also stated that a student's email will not change during their student career, which some people are unhappy with, but I don't think that's a huge issue because all email to their old account will be forwarded to the new one.)
We're doing everything we can to try and make our complaints to all channels, but I was hoping that posting this might help me know about other Universities that are doing the same thing and could give me any advice, and also because the people here are really good at knowing all kinds of ways to get around those restrictions and have POP access, and I figure the more methods I know the better. Hacks really aren't idea, but if they're all we can get, they're what we'll have to take.
I, personally, am not worried about being served malware by any of these programs, seeing as how my operating system isn't even supported except through the webmail client. But other people in the university, not all of them technically aware, will be.
Our switch wasn't cost free--we had an article in our school newspaper about the finances of the deal. We do, however, save quite a penny in the long run as compared to what we have now, which is very understandable in the face of our budget woes. Still, the cost for running a basic service like email don't seem very exhorbiant compared to other things student fees have been spent on, like Palousafest 2006, which the university radio reported cost $20,000.
Once they become alumni MS will put ads in their stuff.
This is an aspect I hadn't heard about yet. I will make sure to ask our ITS department about it. I do know that after 180 days of inactivity, (unread?) mail is deleted from the inbox. While that's probably not an issue for students, I think it might be alumni, especially because mail forwarding is not currently allowed.
Advertisements aren't malware in themselves, but unsavory advertisers will use them to install malware. And Errorsafe/WinFixer IS malware. If you read the the wikipedia article on this software, you'd realize that the program that installs itself without permission, degrades computer performance, bugs the user with popups of lies and harasses them to make a useless purchase. On top of that, it's a bitch to uninstall. If that's not a malicious piece of software, I don't know what is.
And I think that networks that serve advertising should be a little bit more accountable for ads, like Flash-based ones, that can exploit security holes to install malware. There should be better screening--LiveJournal got hit by this same trick last year. So Microsoft SHOULD apologize for letting this kind of cruft through; they shouldn't just trust their advertisers to be honest about whether or not their ads follow their policy or not.
Most uses of a search engine have few if any switching costs, making a monopoly hard to care about. In most instances, all a user has to do is go to a different web site. FireFox may come with Google as the default search engine, but anyone can add different ones in quite easily. It might be harder for webmasters who've integrated Google products into their site, but there are still alternatives out there and it would probably be possible to switch even now. Whereas trying to get away from something like, say, Windows comes with lots of switching costs, if you can even switch to begin with.
Could it really be considered domain squatting if they owned the domain before the existence of youtube.com, did not sell it to someone else, have no intention of selling it to anyone else, and continue to use it for their business?
You definitely know your cons, but at least one of them actually can be solved--
7. You can't alt-tab between windows in the same application. You can switch between programs that way, but not between windows. So if you're typing something in one window (say in Word or whatever) and you need to switch to another document, you can press one of the function keys to get expose up, take you hand off the keyboard, grab the mouse, select the window you want, then put your hand back on the keyboard. This takes far longer and requires much more thought than just pressing alt-tab. You can also select the wind you want from the "window" menu or click and hold the application's icon in the dock until the menu comes up and then select it. Both of these are slower than having a context switch that shows all windows.
While you cannot alt-tab (er, well, Cmd-tab on the Mac) between windows in the same application, you *can* Cmd-` between application windows. No, it's not an obvious command, which really bit for me at first. I spent a month very frustrated with my first Mac because of that. But then I discovered it by accident, and it made everything much, much easier.
I'm also not sure why you think you need to grab the mouse to select a window in Expose--if you just use the arrow keys to go around and select the given window, then press Enter or Space, it will select the window. I can understand Cmd-` being nonobvious, but this method is a lot more accessible.
I use IM for 4 years now (Yahoo) and I've never received a single piece of spim.
I have. Also, Yahoo IM is NOT a decentralized system, so I don't think it makes a good example. (There might be good examples out there; Yahoo just ain't one of them.)
Not to mention that right now he is being taken care of by family, friends, and fan volunteers. If he moves from Brooklyn, who is going to take care of his basic physical needs?
There are still concerns and problems with ads on webpages.
They're vectors for adware and spyware exploiting vulnerabilities to install themselves, and it can happen even if the owners of a website are pretty diligent in trying to screen the ads for security. (Example.)
Too many rich media ads, or badly coded ones, on a webpage can use up way too much CPU power and affect the computer's performance.
In places where ISPs often have monthly bandwidth caps (I hear Australian surfers talk about those, for instance), downloading ads can feel like wasting bandwidth.
For the larger ad networks, ads are always trying to set cookies, and those cookies can be used to track you across many websites, and some people do not want to be tracked.
Slashdot Mirror
To be clear: students won't have to switch to Windows to read their mail. They'd have to switch to Windows to have a supported desktop email client. Not quite as severe, but certainly inconvenient. I can't switch to Windows; my department is very Mac-centric and they provide my laptop. I guess if I got a copy of Windows I could install it now that they're Intel based, but it's better for my work when I'm on the system the department and software we use prefers, and I prefer Mac OS X to Windows personally anyway.
Also, while it would be nice to just refuse to use that address, it's simply not practical to practice. Official University information is sent to it, including communication from professors to their classes, and that system won't change. There is no way I know of to set up an auto-reply on the Windows Live Mail system--I checked the options with my throwaway Hotmail. (And some emails are sent by automated systems that won't change, or from lists automatically populated by student email addresses.) While it would be possible to move away from that email for the most part, you would still have to check it; the frequency would depend on the tendencies of your particular classes at the moment to communicate messages through email.
...I do know they run WebCT, but I don't know much about it, though I hear grumbling from those who have to use it now and again.
I'm not sure what that would do; I'm looking at this and I don't see a relation of the security breach to outsourcing of the email.
I'm not in the CS department anymore, but they phased out the internal email system for CS students a while ago, keeping it only for faculty, since all students had a University provided email anyway. I don't know how many other departments might have internal mail.
Even that wouldn't solve everyone's problem--people are asking how to set up this account with their Outlook and they can't, even though both Windows Live Mail and Outlook are Microsoft products and they're on a Windows system.
Ugh. At least I know the faculty is just as inconvenienced as we are. None of my professors are going to enjoy the lack of POP3.
That might not be true--the staff and faculty are being moved to an MS Exchange server, not Windows Live Mail, and MS Exchange supports POP if set up properly (to my understanding). In any case, they're not going to be on WLM. It's only student emails being migrated.
We're trying our utmost hardest to figure that out, believe me. I've been lead to understand that the SCAC was part of this decision process. They are set out in the student association's rules to:
However, we have gotten a response back from the faculty co-chair of the SCAC saying that they last met in Spring 2006 and were not involved with the implementation, and suggested I contact the student co-chair.
The concerns about malware are fringe and would be a non-issue (for me) entirely if we could use our regular clients and people had the option to use another desktop client. Our ITS department is always very pro-active about security, with regular emails encouraging people to try and secure their computers.
As for your slurs towards my personal affairs, I'm not running Linux right now, although in the future I'm planning to get back into that titillating groove, and I live in an apartment, 'cause I like cooking my own food and keeping pets.
Do you know whether Windows Live Mail reserves that right? Part of the reason WLM was chosen over Google Apps at the time was because of the advertising. However, it was not the only reason. (I don't know whether Google actually told them that or whether they were just gleaning things from the website.)
We have been writing letters and commenting on their news article about it. We also have flyers up so that people can print out their own and post them on bulletin boards, and have done posting ourselves as well. I'll get in touch with my colleagues and see if anyone's contacted the paper's editors on doing another story that talks about the other side of the migration, as well.
Just so you don't think us totally lazy, we did figure out guides and instructions up for interfacing with Thunderbird before I posted this, but I was hoping there would be other methods, as well, because not all of us use Thunderbird. Eudora, Apple Mail, and even Outlook are other mail clients that people might be using.
Notice the last: you cannot forward your email. You cannot forward your email.
I should note that this policy is not Microsoft's fault, or at least their lack of it wouldn't have affected the choice anyway, because our email policy made in 2003 decided that too many people were missing important University emails when they forwarded because of spam filters and outages out of the University's control. Therefore, students can't forward their email. I can understand that, but it adds a layer onto our problems, because we can't set up our own email accounts and simply have our mail forwarded. (Although this change does break the policy a little--it also stated that a student's email will not change during their student career, which some people are unhappy with, but I don't think that's a huge issue because all email to their old account will be forwarded to the new one.)
We're doing everything we can to try and make our complaints to all channels, but I was hoping that posting this might help me know about other Universities that are doing the same thing and could give me any advice, and also because the people here are really good at knowing all kinds of ways to get around those restrictions and have POP access, and I figure the more methods I know the better. Hacks really aren't idea, but if they're all we can get, they're what we'll have to take.
That would be really great news! Could you tell me how to do that? I'd really love to tell people about that. Thanks!
I, personally, am not worried about being served malware by any of these programs, seeing as how my operating system isn't even supported except through the webmail client. But other people in the university, not all of them technically aware, will be.
Our switch wasn't cost free--we had an article in our school newspaper about the finances of the deal. We do, however, save quite a penny in the long run as compared to what we have now, which is very understandable in the face of our budget woes. Still, the cost for running a basic service like email don't seem very exhorbiant compared to other things student fees have been spent on, like Palousafest 2006, which the university radio reported cost $20,000.
Thank you very much!
Once they become alumni MS will put ads in their stuff.
This is an aspect I hadn't heard about yet. I will make sure to ask our ITS department about it. I do know that after 180 days of inactivity, (unread?) mail is deleted from the inbox. While that's probably not an issue for students, I think it might be alumni, especially because mail forwarding is not currently allowed.
Advertisements aren't malware in themselves, but unsavory advertisers will use them to install malware. And Errorsafe/WinFixer IS malware. If you read the the wikipedia article on this software, you'd realize that the program that installs itself without permission, degrades computer performance, bugs the user with popups of lies and harasses them to make a useless purchase. On top of that, it's a bitch to uninstall. If that's not a malicious piece of software, I don't know what is.
And I think that networks that serve advertising should be a little bit more accountable for ads, like Flash-based ones, that can exploit security holes to install malware. There should be better screening--LiveJournal got hit by this same trick last year. So Microsoft SHOULD apologize for letting this kind of cruft through; they shouldn't just trust their advertisers to be honest about whether or not their ads follow their policy or not.
I like Open Source Mac for open source software that runs on Macs. It's easy to hand out to friends who have Macs.
Most uses of a search engine have few if any switching costs, making a monopoly hard to care about. In most instances, all a user has to do is go to a different web site. FireFox may come with Google as the default search engine, but anyone can add different ones in quite easily. It might be harder for webmasters who've integrated Google products into their site, but there are still alternatives out there and it would probably be possible to switch even now. Whereas trying to get away from something like, say, Windows comes with lots of switching costs, if you can even switch to begin with.
The game was called Darwin and inspired the Core War game that still has a competition to this day. But I'm not sure if it really counts as a virus?
Could it really be considered domain squatting if they owned the domain before the existence of youtube.com, did not sell it to someone else, have no intention of selling it to anyone else, and continue to use it for their business?
You definitely know your cons, but at least one of them actually can be solved--
7. You can't alt-tab between windows in the same application. You can switch between programs that way, but not between windows. So if you're typing something in one window (say in Word or whatever) and you need to switch to another document, you can press one of the function keys to get expose up, take you hand off the keyboard, grab the mouse, select the window you want, then put your hand back on the keyboard. This takes far longer and requires much more thought than just pressing alt-tab. You can also select the wind you want from the "window" menu or click and hold the application's icon in the dock until the menu comes up and then select it. Both of these are slower than having a context switch that shows all windows.
While you cannot alt-tab (er, well, Cmd-tab on the Mac) between windows in the same application, you *can* Cmd-` between application windows. No, it's not an obvious command, which really bit for me at first. I spent a month very frustrated with my first Mac because of that. But then I discovered it by accident, and it made everything much, much easier.
I'm also not sure why you think you need to grab the mouse to select a window in Expose--if you just use the arrow keys to go around and select the given window, then press Enter or Space, it will select the window. I can understand Cmd-` being nonobvious, but this method is a lot more accessible.
I use IM for 4 years now (Yahoo) and I've never received a single piece of spim.
I have. Also, Yahoo IM is NOT a decentralized system, so I don't think it makes a good example. (There might be good examples out there; Yahoo just ain't one of them.)
Not to mention that right now he is being taken care of by family, friends, and fan volunteers. If he moves from Brooklyn, who is going to take care of his basic physical needs?
There are still concerns and problems with ads on webpages.
They're vectors for adware and spyware exploiting vulnerabilities to install themselves, and it can happen even if the owners of a website are pretty diligent in trying to screen the ads for security. (Example.)
Too many rich media ads, or badly coded ones, on a webpage can use up way too much CPU power and affect the computer's performance.
In places where ISPs often have monthly bandwidth caps (I hear Australian surfers talk about those, for instance), downloading ads can feel like wasting bandwidth.
For the larger ad networks, ads are always trying to set cookies, and those cookies can be used to track you across many websites, and some people do not want to be tracked.