im sure this is hardly a rarity, but it annoys me. at my college we have hundreds and hundreds of machines running xp pro, each one with the full ms office suite, vb 6.0, vb.net, visio and.... that is all i can remember. we are restricted to ie as well. in fact the only thing i can think of that isnt microsoft is GIMP, and that is because microsoft dont actually have a graphics editing package. oh and until recently they would reject remote logons to the intranet if you weren't using ie.

i see something fundamentally wrong with a place of education sending out messages like this.

i am being taught computing, and i get the feeling i know more about computing than my teacher does. he claims that "anything you can get for free is rubbish", and i often teach *him* programming tricks.

just a rant.


(oh this is a uk college, not american, i think the systems are slightly different. this is a post high school pre university course, just so you'ld know)

actually, microsoft either gives them a huge discount, or sells to them in bulk (you can get like 4 bagillion keys at once or something...)...

im interning at the university or md and its running redhat el on its machines (atleast in the computer science dept.)...i think they do it becuase they want support, and you can get support unless you pay... *i think*

4 bagillion * something small > free


anyway its not so much the xp that is annoying. xp the best choice when you have computer noobs arround. but they could have at least used delphi instead of vb. just to throw *something* in to the mix

So what? My Uni's website (not the main homepage, but the section students login to, which is also supposed to be "secure") is completely ActiveX based.

"anything you can get for free is rubbish"

LMAO sounds like a very educated fellow.

As if Microsoft cares enough to pay off a college to use their products They'd be getting educational licenses which are cheaper and if you really want to use linux, almost all browsers can be made to impersonate another one, just make Firefox/Opera/whatever to identify as IE6.

Mircosoft does go to universities and make some pretty compelling offers. Often these offers are cheaper than alternative solutions the university was considering (much cheaper) and appear to offer so much more.

At the first university I attended that's exactly what happened. For much less than the cost of the Sun server(s) the college of engineering was considering, the school was given Windows servers, windows licenses for all the students, programming tools, office, and more. All on a three year license. It was an astounding deal considering the other options the head of the department had considered. Three years later, Microsoft came back and said to keep the setup was going to cost X amount. Where X amount was about 10-20 times the original cost.

This was a major attempted rape. Some engineering students were entering their senior year with projects completely developed on Window and towards Windows computers. Everything was based on Microsoft... in short, Redmond had the college by the short hairs.

The head of the department was furious at this turn about. Instead of bending over and taking the easy road, he wiped every Microsoft system in the college. Moved to Linux (for desktops), Sun servers, and assorted other hardware and software. He refused to have anything to do with Microsoft after that -- and spend the majority of the next year working with graduating students to ensure that their projects did not fail due to the change over. After that it was policy that students in the engineering department did not use Windows or if they did they dual-booted into a *nix.

The same thing happened to the Computer Science college at the same time. That department opted to stick with Microsoft (the university left technology decisions up to each individual college). I think, knowing how much deeper they were mired, it was an understandable choice. And Microsoft made out like a bandit. They college still gets steep discounts on software for students and computers used by them but it's not nearly like it was originally.

It's win-win for Microsoft to practically give their software to colleges. Once they have the whole department geared for their products they can up their license costs without too much fear of losing the sale. And even if they keep the license costs low... they are having future professionals trained on their products, in the mindset of their products, and more likely to desire to continue working with their products when they leave school and someone (possibly their employer if not the individual) has to pay for their products.

Edit: Fix numerical typo

My wife is currently doing her teaching degree and I helped her with the ICT bits. What they know when they've finished is depressingly little. They focus on things like can you use MS WORD to format a document. There was not one word that hinted that any other software company exists except MS let alone a whole different development model called Open Source.

So you most probably DO know more than your teacher. My 13 yo sons ICT teacher has had to ask him for help to sort out a printer driver! Says it all.