I suspect its more because the electrical & computer engineering (ECE) department pretty much only operates *nix clusters. I'm not sure on the specifics but I'm sure its out of practicality more than anything. They don't offer some of these super expensive software packages as downloadable software, but rather only have them installed on the clusters, and using X windows through SSH tunnels may have been more practical than Windows terminal services. (Most cluster computers are accessible directly - CMU owns a lot of IP addresses)
As an alumnus of Carnegie Mellon, I'm going to assume this is no big deal, but possibly at least confirms what people think. CMU has several Unix clusters, as well as Mac clusters. All of the downloadable software is supported on as many platforms as the software is created with. In fact, several classes (especially the digital IC design with CADENCE) are operated only in *nix environments.
VPN access to on-campus resources are also provided in all operating environments, and having used both the PC and *nix ones, I can say documentation is quite complete. This is a relatively recent development, however, as the documentation and support has greatly improved since I started at CMU.
It greatly helps when the professors are experts in the software they're teaching and help debug problems with the IT department. (The Hadoop cluster was especially fun to debug, especially with the broken JAR file passing in 0.20.1).
I think the letter he wrote in reply to the non-final rejection was the most representative of this person's delusion. I reuploaded it at scribd for easy access: http://www.scribd.com/doc/57372518/USPTO-05-27-2008-Miscellaneous-Incoming-Letter
As I read it, all I could think of is if you're god why do you need the patent office to enforce the sue of your abilities?
Yeah, sorry. I misread the letter. It says I must send it back if I decide not to continue participating in this program.
Agreed. I'm participating in this and I've had my router since around November.
Also they're not "giving them away" per se. The routers have custom firmware on them and they come with a letter saying when we're done we want the routers back otherwise we're sending you a bill (as agreed on when you signed up for the program).
As a CMU student who heard from a professor who shall remain unnamed, the future of computing doesn't lie in "parallelization across a single resource," but massively parallelizable computing, or distributed-resource computing. OO languages are not great at that as message-passing has massive overhead when serializing and deserializing. Thus, in the interest of the "future" they're moving away from OO as a freshman course, and instead leave it for the more specific courses. (15-211, etc).
That could be all speculation by the professor who shall remain unnamed but it also could be that the silly drama students have to take a programming course and they have no use for OO so they're dumbing it down so that not all the drama students fail. I suspect the latter.
If you RTFM you'll know that the summary is misleading. A quote from TFA best explains the claims:
"The patents Kodak holds are incredibly broad, effectively covering images that are stored centrally and can be ordered online,"
I agree. The alternatives there provide sync across computers but only for the same browser. I use both Chrome and Firefox extensively and I will greatly miss the ability for (fo)Xmarks to sync my bookmarks, passwords and tabs across all my browsers, regardless of whether its Chrome/Firefox.
For now, I'm using Firefox sync as my primary syncing mechanism and importing into Chrome whenever I update something in Firefox. Its somewhat annoying, but I guess I'll deal. Maybe I'll switch back to using primarily Firefox.
I've noticed several design suggestions in your code.