Eric Maino

System.Brain.CoreDump();

Life's just a bunch of Politics

I stopped by the office of a departmental employee today to see what their reaction would be, when I asked to get an addition boot option in one of our labs. I told them I think it would be nice to have the option to boot into Windows XP,so hands-on labs using VS.Net could be taught, even if it wasn't public knowlege of everyone in the department or available to everyone on a regualr basis, just having the option available from time to time would be a great resource to have. Their reply to this was, “It's not gonna happen. No way!”. Even though there is pleanty of space on the hardware there is no possible way it will be approved. They said it's a game of politics and some of the decision makers for the lab will not let any MS products be installed. I just think this is BS and if the department has the ability to provide a resource to its students, I think it should almost be obligated to do so in order to futher the students applicable knowlege.

Posted: Sep 25 2003, 12:27 AM by emaino | with 6 comment(s)
Filed under:

Comments

Chris Stewart said:

This is quite common I'm afraid. I work in my major department at school as a NetTech. Our students are quite lucky as they get all sorts of software on the lab machines, but I know many of the professors are die hard fans of one technology or another. I mention I'm doing a cool project in .NET, and some of them act like it's worthless. Although I just automated our account creation process for Active Directory. It will only save all future NetTechs an hour a day (there are about 6 steps to take for every account). It takes about 5 mins now. The best part is it took me about 10 hours to write the code (I'm about to refactor everything now since I have a working prototype).
# September 25, 2003 12:33 AM

SBC said:

yup... it's true - the 'real world' politics (opinions) are very difficult to understand at times. I have encountered situation where I came to the conclusion - 'You can't get little pregnant with .NET!
# September 25, 2003 7:53 AM

Jerry Dennany said:

Are you certain that it's politics and not money? Schools don't have infinite resources, and maintaining an alternate OS can be pricey in terms of maintenance and licensing. (aha, I can't believe that I just referred to XP as an 'alternate OS')
# September 25, 2003 12:25 PM

Anthony Shaw said:

I'm also a student at GVSU, who also worked in the IT department and I know firsthand that it's not an issue of money. They have so many licenses for Windows XP that they don't know what to do with all of them. The CS department has some very tight fisted political people on the board and such, and they don't want to stir up any trouble with their contributers :-/
# September 26, 2003 3:49 PM

Eric Lathrop said:

From my perspective:

CS People don't want Microsoft in their labs because they like working with software that they can hack if they need to. Most unix systems have the GNU toolchain installed. If you find a bug in the compiler you can patch it. You can't do that with Microsoft right now.

Also alot of instructional software is built to run on unix. The NachOS instructional operating system the was use in my operating systems class only runs on unix.

Finally, CS people usually like OSes that come with a compiler.;)
# September 26, 2003 9:50 PM

camaroie said:

<a href=2yd.net/1jk>coffeeshop millionaire</a>

# January 11, 2012 6:06 PM
Leave a Comment

(required) 

(required) 

(optional)

(required)