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Microsoft Invests in the University of Waterloo
Posted by
michael
on Wed Aug 14, 2002 05:58 PM
from the cash-reserves-proving-useful dept.
from the cash-reserves-proving-useful dept.
saforrest writes "Say goodbye to independent academia. In a presentation by Microsoft on Wednesday at the University of Waterloo, a new joint initiative was announced which involves the addition of a mandatory course on C# for all electrical and computer engineers. 'Completion of this course
will be mandatory for students entering the E&CE
program.'" Microsoft's press release is available.
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Nooooooo! (Score:5, Insightful)
Ah well, at least my old Physics department is underfunded (wait... RIM is investing $150 million in a new Physics research institute @ the U of Waterloo? DOH!)
Waterloo always had close ties with industry. Now they appear to have an umbilical cord.
Re:Nooooooo! (Score:5, Informative)
No such requirements are present in the Computer Science program.
Parent
At least C# is (probably) useful (Score:3, Funny)
Re:At least C# is (probably) useful (Score:3, Insightful)
Learning languages currently being marketed by corporations is stupidly shortsighted. I'd about exepct this from a 2-year tech school, maybe, but a university?
"Hey kids! This semester, we'll learn about object oriented programming! Open your C# manual to page..."
"Hey kids! This semester, we'll learn about data structures! Open your C# manual to page..."
"Hey kids! This semester, we'll learn about algorithms! Open your C# manual to page..."
"Hey kids! This semester, we'll learn about ethics! Open your C# manual to page..."
Re:At least C# is (probably) useful (Score:3, Insightful)
Please check the java.lang.reflect package in the standard J2SDK and come back to this thread. And while you are doing so check the JPDA architecture and head up to the Eclipse Project [eclipse.org] to see a ass kicking implementation of meta data and reflection.
BTW, all this was in Java a lot of time ago, if you didn't know it, that's your fault.
I would like someone to explain us what's about the getter and setter structure in C#, it's like Minority Report: Spielberg couldn't get rid of the whole AI crap completely
Re:Nooooooo! (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re:Nooooooo! (Score:4, Informative)
Waterloo does not have, and is not getting a Comp Sci faculty. They have a mathematics faculty, one of a few in the world. That in turn had a Computer Science department, which has now become a School of Computer Science. They are also now starting to offer a Bachelors of Computer Science, although the old Bachelors of Math with a major in Computer Science will still be available. The new B.CS will be less math intensive, and more open to specialization in various areas.
-Rob
Parent
Re:Nooooooo! (Score:3, Insightful)
Now this view is obviously fading a bit with the School of Computer Science, but it was hardly a secret.
Re:Nooooooo! (Score:3, Insightful)
For one thing a Java compiler and JVM exists for every platform that you can name. And you don't have to have a special development environment to hack Java. All you need is a Java compiler, a JVM and a text editor. I am not interested in paying money for Microsoft's tools, nor am I interested in booting into Windows to use them.
Re:Nooooooo! (Score:4, Insightful)
jearl@porter:~$ csc
bash: csc: command not found
jearl@porter:~$ apt-cache search csc
cbrowser - a C/C++ source code indexing, querying and browsing tool
cscope - Interactively examine a C program source
libcteco50000 - Orga Eco 5000 smartcard reader PCSC and CT-API driver
libgempc410 - PC/SC driver for the GemPC 410 smart card reader
libgempc430 - PC/SC driver for the GemPC 430 smart card reader
libpcsc-perl - Perl interface to the PC/SC smart card library
libpcsclite-dev - PCSC Lite client development files
libpcsclite0 - PCSC Lite client library
libslbreflex2 - Reflex 62/64 smartcard reader PCSC and CT-API driver
libstring-approx-perl - Perl extension for approximate matching (fuzzy matching)
libtowitoko2 - Towitoko smartcard reader PCSC and CT-API driver
pcsc-tools - Some tools to be used with smart cards and PC/SC
pcscd - PCSC Lite resource manager daemon
slib - Portable Scheme library.
I apparently don't have a csc compiler available. Perhaps it's in non-free?
Parent
C# crashed and burned at our school (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:C# crashed and burned at our school (Score:3, Interesting)
; missing line 41
It's not half bad for a teaching environment! Oh wait, you need to be able to BABY newby programmers more than that don't you... damn
Bryan
Re:C# crashed and burned at our school (Score:3, Insightful)
Sure those are the comp sci requirements.... (Score:4, Funny)
Sure those are the comp sci requirements, but what are the biz school requirements?
The monopoly corporation as a friend to free market economics 101?
any other microsoft required classes you can think of?
Re:Sure those are the comp sci requirements....NO! (Score:5, Interesting)
Not Comp Sci. Comp Eng. Myself and some of my peers that are in Comp Sci are going to draft a letter shortly, asking whtether anything similar is in the works, and insisting that students be consulted. The School of Computer Science at Waterloo is very responsive to student issues, and I think more 'academic' and less 'industry oriented' than the Computer Engineers.
-Rob
Parent
why this is a bad idea (Score:3, Interesting)
Warning: Too many connections in
Warning: MySQL Connection Failed: Too many connections in
could not connect to database
Re:why this is a bad idea (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:why this is a bad idea (Score:5, Informative)
hey, at UWS we use open source/free software. :-) it's a LAMP box.
paul
(uws sysadmin type)
Parent
Buying mandatory classes? (Score:5, Insightful)
The fact that this University is willing to sacrifice any sort of appearence of propriety in order to squeeze a few bucks out of Microsoft is as pathetic and outragous as if they were to let the parents of poorly-performing students buy their way in with large cash donations.
Of course, the latter example happens all the time, but at least they don't brag about it in press releases.
Anyhow, it seems to me a horrible idea to set this sort of prescident. What's next? Coke gives a few bucks to the football team and suddenly all students have to undergo a session about the crisp, refreshing taste of Coke, Diet Coke and Sprite? The music industry buys the U a building and, next thing you know, all students are required to buy $300 of Britney and N'Sync albums for their music appreciation courses?
Universities should be about education, not indoctrination. Unless these are the best languages for teaching the foundations of computer programming (and they are not), they shouldn't be required.
Re:Buying mandatory classes? (Score:5, Insightful)
--locust
Parent
Re:Buying mandatory classes? (Score:3, Insightful)
By the by, California is headed in this direction, too. Apparently people here think that quality education is free, and that it's just the greedy teachers (who can't afford to live here anyhow) who would be taking their money otherwise. Oh well, when I have kids I should be able to afford to send them to an expensive private school.
Happiness is Mandatory (Score:4, Informative)
Xix.
Parent
Proprietary and Acadamia just don't mix (Score:5, Insightful)
Any CS program that concentrates too heavily on one thing (ie programming in C# or Java for that matter) really short changes its students and limits the potential that they can achieve. A much more broad approach, while not churning out top notch Java developers, produces excellent problem solvers who are able to quickly learn and adapt to the ever-changing technology world. Looking back on my undergrad experience I think that playing around on the HP-UX and AT&T UNIX (R) box helped me break out of the mold and learn much more effectively.
So? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:So? (Score:4, Funny)
For the same reason, if I were to pick a single language to be taught to engineers, I wouldn't recommend teaching Java either.
You should start with something like C that teaches the fundamentals, then when you know how a computer *really* works, you can move on to a higher level language like C# or Java.
Parent
Microsoft marketing gurus (Score:3, Funny)
Jane: "Darn it, Bob, I just don't understand. No matter how many times we ask people, 'Where do you want to go today?', they still seem to think of us as a big, bullying monopolist."
Bob: "Well, Jane, maybe we should just change the message. Perhaps if we say, 'Where do you really want to go today?', people will respond better!"
The guy in the corner from developer marketing meekly raises his hand. "Uh, guys, perhaps if we didn't put out press releases crowing about our ability to buy out universities, we wouldn't be perceived as bullies."
Jane: "Bob, I think your proposal is right on the money!"
Bob: "Hey, that's why they pay us the big bucks, right?"
Dijkstra's comments on similar case (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Dijkstra's comments on similar case (Score:3, Insightful)
Really, I agree with almost everything you say; my CS courses had fuck-all to do with computer science. However, I find I use my differential equations, geometry, and fourier analysis more than I do the useless Pascal and Visual Idiot classes.
Computer Science has to do with mathematics and logic. Geometry teaches logic better than most programming language classes. CS has to do with deconstruction of problems. Diff-eq teaches deconstruction. CS has a lot to do with analysis. Physics has a lot to teach about analysis.
Don't shortchange other studies just because they don't teach CS directly. There is a lot to learn from math, and physics, and chemistry, and even freakin' English.
Other than that: you are completely correct. They aren't teaching computer science. Most places teach lame-assed language principles I learned back in 8th grade, on my Apple ][.
Old Hat Distribution (Score:3, Informative)
The myth of Waterloo (Score:5, Interesting)
[This is an excerpt from chapter 2 [iuniverse.com] of my book [proudlyserving.com].]
- adamRe:The myth of Waterloo (Score:4, Insightful)
After being surrounded by innumerable UW students in the last 5 years, I'm more than thrilled to see their self-congratulatory egos shattered by the hammer of reality. There's a common fallacy among UW CS/CE/EE students that goes like this:
1. School X is good
2: I go to school X
3. Therefore, I am good.
But many of the UW grads I've worked with don't know their heads from their asses. Ask anyone who has ever TA'd CS 354 (the third-year Operating Systems class), and who has had students ask them what a heap is, for example. And yet, they'll strut around school, thinking about how companies will stumble over each other in offering them cushy jobs with huge salaries, free Odwalla, etc.
Parent
Re:The myth of Waterloo (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Re:The myth of Waterloo (Score:5, Interesting)
And how many famous poeple do you know the alma mater of?
A lot of guys from my time at U of Waterloo have done stuff to get noticed. People like Mark Tilden get written about. Ever heard of RIM? Built almost entirely by UW people, and I know their names and went to school with many of 'em, so you might not.
Some for the people who founded Mortis Kern, who were also the people who wrote Coherent, pretty well known in Unix circles.
Know Tom Duff and Bill Reeves? They're pretty famous in computer graphics circles. You see their names on the credits or a lot of movies from ILM and PIXAR. Late 70s waterloo folks again.
Walter Banks, one of the founders of Byte magazine? Scott Vanstone, pioneer in eliptic curve cryptography. (he taught me crypto.) And as the article suggests, though MS doesn't make its programmers into stars, a ton of Microsoft's code is from UW grads.
And you know, I'm not as famous as Stallman but I'm not that unknown myself in the online world.
And this is just the guys from my time around 1980. Lots of other folks after us went on to great things, but I don't necessarily know what school they went to.
Of course, UW is a young school, just coming up on 45 years of age. It got famous for WATFOR when it was only 10 years old. It takes a lot of time and reputation to get to the level of those other schools.
Is it the best school in the world? Who knows, but I know when I started hiring people years later, few I found from various U.S. schools were as good as the friends I had who were the best from Waterloo.
Parent
Re:misses the point (Score:3, Insightful)
I think microsoft would notice, they put a lot of effort into their hiring.
Re:The myth of Waterloo (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree with your assessment that there's a mythos behind UW students that seems to be carried among other companies as well, particularily in professional service firms, whether smaller ones or larger (like Accenture). But this mythos isn't entirely without basis.
I would generalize your observation to include my own experiences interviewing and working with UW co-ops and graduates: many UW students often *do* interview better than most other graduates and/or interns. And they often do generate better-than-average results. Over the past 2 companies I've worked for on the U.S. west coast and the east coast -- management fell in love with UW students.
I would attribute this to what some might find surprising: many CS and Eng students at UW have very good communication skills relative to their peers in other schools. The co-op program requires them to be good, since they have to work in between heads-down course work. Naturally every class has legendary high-mark/anti-social students, but they wind up being professors anyway *grin*.
A secondary reason for UW student's success at Microsoft and PSFs is that UW tends to hammer programming skills into CS students, even if it kills them (as anyone who's taken Operating Systems will attest to).
Being relatively professional speakers, the best UW co-ops are usually both confident & technically savvy enough to be placed on the front-lines to do real work -- whether in front of a client for a contract, or @ Microsoft with the culture of debating ideas.
Usually the UW co-ops and/or graduates I have known have been better than many full-time employees at client sites. But not perfect. I find UW grads, like all grads, have a lot of learning to do in placing systems work in business context. There's also a general lack of both high and low-level design skills, and an overemphasis on tricky algorithms and/or cleverness. The cynic in me believes this makes them fit right into Microsoft, which until
So, in summary: there is a myth around waterloo students, but not entirely unwarrented. They're more experienced programmers than most regular interns from other schools, and often they can be better communicators.
Parent
think this is a bad idea? tell the president! (Score:3, Insightful)
- email president@uwaterloo.ca [mailto]
- phone 519-888-4567, Ext. 2202
- fax 519-888-6337
Job Interviews in 4 Years... (Score:5, Funny)
Grad: "I know C#! Hire me!"
Industry: "C#. Check. What else do you know?"
Grad: "Huh? Like what?"
Industry: "Well, what did you learn in some of your other courses?
Grad: "I know how to design a web page so that it only works under Internet Explorer."
Industry: "Hmm..okaaaay. What type of degree did you say you have again?"
Grad: "I have a copy right here..."
Industry: "That says MCSE. That's not a diploma."
Grad: "No, it is. There's some fine print at the bottom. See?"
The Other UW and Microsoft (Score:4, Insightful)
Our new building is being funded almost exclusivly by personal donations from Paul Allen and Bill Gates. We do a large amount a research with Microsoft Research. All students get all the free Microsoft Software they want (except games). Some of our talented faculty have spent many years at Microsoft
Desite all that we still have Unix orientation for new students. All homework is required to be turned in with a Unix Makefile and compile under gcc. Java is our introductory language.
I didn't write a line of code in Windows while I was there and I'm the rule and not the exception. I suspect University of Waterloo is has a pedagogical philosophy more along the lines of a community college and scimps on theory.
At the University of Washington I felt no pressure to learn Microsoft products or proprietary languages. It was quite the opposite, in fact. I'm certain no other University has a stronger relationship with Microsoft.
Re:The Other UW and Microsoft (Score:5, Interesting)
Not at all... Waterloo is VERY heavy on theory. It's not rated one of the top Canadian universities year after year [uwaterloo.ca] for behaving like a community college. You learn theory in class, and you learn practical on your co-op terms... last time I heard, UW had the largest co-op program in the entire world. It's a pretty good mix, not to mention it helps you pay your own way.
Just don't venture into the psych building, or the 6th floor of the math building without a compass and a ball of string, or you'll never get out alive.
Parent
Not an "additional mandatory course" (Score:3, Interesting)
This is not a case of an "additional mandatory course on C#" being added to the curriculum. This is an instance where the language of instruction in one of the already mandatory courses, namely ECE 150 [uwaterloo.ca], is being changed from C++ to C#.
This does not make the degree a "Microsoft degree," anymore than using Java in introductory courses (as UW's School of Computer Science [uwaterloo.ca] does) makes a degree a "Sun degree."
C# is OK, the decision is not (Score:5, Insightful)
What is not acceptable, however, is for grants from a company to be tied to the use of its products in the curriculum. And, in fact, while C# is fine technically and educationally, Java would still be a more useful language for students to learn.
Decisions like this really call into question the academic integrity of a university; potential students of U. of Waterloo should take notice.
Webcast (with slides) for presentation (Score:3, Informative)
EULA Shrinkwrap 4 University of Waterloo Degrees? (Score:5, Funny)
the other reason this is lame... (Score:3, Interesting)
I looked at the numbers in the MS press release and thought: $10 spread over 5 years and across all the universities in the country? How lame? $2.3M for this deal ($7.7M left for the remaining 4 years).
Ten million dollars is equivilant to what, perhaps 4 seconds worth of profit from Microsoft? Consider that Microsoft proper currently sits on $40 billion in cash. If they where taxes 30% on that money. $2.3 million would be due in about 2 hours. This doesn't even get in to their temendous cash flow.
Waterloo isn't just a Microsoft whore, it's a damed cheap one at that. I can understand selling out for the money, but they should have at least demanded $50M per year.
Re:Where's the Problem? (Score:3, Insightful)
And what about those students that are already here? I'm not in Computer Engineering, but Computer Science at Waterloo. I find it offensive that my school would sell out its curriculum to Microsoft. Switching schools is hardly a reasonable option for someone that's already here, though I would consider it if it happened in CS and not just CompEng.
-Rob
Re:Where's the Problem? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a good deal for both sides.
Deals between hospitals and insurance companies for managed health care are good for both sides. But are they good for the patient? Deals between the military and arms contractors are good for both sides. But are they good for soldiers & taxpayers? Hypothetical deals between congressmen and lobbyists ("hypothetical" because there is, of course, no quid pro quo) are good for both sides, but are they good for voters and citizens?
Is this deal good for the students of UW? THAT is the only question that matters.
Parent
Re:Waterloo has the most recognised CS program (Score:3, Interesting)
That happens to be a very Ontario-centric, Toronto is the centre of the universe opinion. (Even though Waterloo is not in Toronto) Outside of Ontario, the opinion of Waterloo is that it has a very good graduate program, but its undergrad program puts out spagetti coders.
If your looking for an undergrad, take a look into UofC, or SFU. SFU has a coop program just as good as Waterloo, if not better.
If you're looking for a graduate school, you wanna school with a prof that works with stuff you are interested in. And a bigger school, such as UBC or UofT, that throws a lot of money at research. (Which sometimes involves selling your soul to the devil)
But you state you wanna go to Waterloo so you can make big bucks. Here's a little tip. Do what you like. If you like it, you will be good at it. If you're good at it, then you'll make money.
But if you wanna just make the big bucks, go to Waterloo. You and MS will make a great couple.
Re:Academic Integrity (Score:5, Insightful)
Beyond the fact that C# isn't by any stretch the best language to teach concerning the basics of computer programming (and as such is a disservice to the students at large), this also sets a horrible prescident. Maybe Putnam can buy this U a new administrative building and get a new mandatory lit class added -- "Lit 203 -- The Works of Tom Clancy"
Parent
Re:Ontario has sold out!! (Score:3, Funny)
Of course you are.
1. This is entirely un-new. Old hat, rehashed potatoes, whatever you want to call it. This is age old, time tested, whatever. Colleges need and want money.
2. There is nothing insidious about this. Its one class, they teach a variety of other products/platforms.
3. This is realistic. If you work with computers you will almost certainly interact with MS/MS based products at least once. Do they teach doctors how to operate soley by looking at dead pigs? No, there are significant time spent with human corpses.
4. This is not much worse or better than choosing Sun (as many institutions do) or Borland products. It is only slightly [more or less] proprietary.
5. Research costs money. Coporations want research. Coporations usually have money (not always!). Its a perfect fit. Pure science is usually worthless, but luckily, corporations effectively subsidize pure research. If 99% of research is directed by corporations and there is still a solid 1% that is "pure research". And thats a lot better than the 0% that would be conducted without corporate funding.
Re:Bill doesn't own C# (Score:3, Insightful)
Try it this way: yeah but everytime you say Java(tm) you tend to spread word of mouth about Sun Microsystems. So even if there is a Java(tm) compiler for linux, Sun gets free advertising.
Oh, but Sun is the good megacorp, and Java(tm) is an open source and standards-based, well, OK, it isn't really, but C#, is, well, it is an ECMA standard. But Microsoft is bad, no matter what.