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Intel

Intel tells Harvard, 'Cover that Mac!' 221

Posted by emmett from the king-of-spain-never-rushes dept.
datarealm writes "In a story on yahoo, Intel badgered Harvard into covering all iMac kiosks during an Intel sponsored event. Apparently the Intel provided covers trapped heat, forcing the machines to not only be covered, but also powered down." How much of is this happening in donations to education, and what questions need to be asked when companies sponsor these kind of things?
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Intel tells Harvard, 'Cover that Mac!' More

Intel tells Harvard, 'Cover that Mac!'

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  • Read the article. the request went through the provost's office, before FASCS. True, it probably didn't go through Rudenstine, but it was at a higher level than the guy at the help desk.

  • Thanks for the link. It certainly gives a different emphasis to the story. The Yahoo article does not even hint that the display was originally supposed to have been somewhere else. Unless we know why the display had to be moved, and who decided to put Intel's display near a lot of iMacs, we should not assume that Intel set out to disable the iMacs.

    Was it a case of "Hi. We have moved your display into a room full of your competitors equipment."? You don't have to be Intel to be upset by that if that is what happened. (But perhaps you have to be Intel to have anyone care that you are upset!)

  • yeah, or you could've just turned them off and covered them.. eerr.. thats exactly what they did

  • Sponsors give money for two main reasons:

    • They want to be seen giving money to a needy cause.
    • They want to be seen being supported by a respected entity.

    In this case it was the latter, and it means they're effectively buying a service from Harvard.

    Why should they give money to an entity that isn't indicating in return that they're fully behind the sponsor?

    Harvard is benefitting from the money. If it doesn't like those terms, there's nothing whatsoever to stop it from accepting the money.

    Harvard has obviously done a cost/benefit analysis of selling this part of their reputation, but blame Harvard - not Intel.

  • Hmmm, tons of comments, and nobody came up with anything essential unless you interpret essential as meaning 'essential now that you're stuck with Mac hardware.' O well.
  • Now companies aren't restricted from naming competitors in their ads.

    I didn't think they were ever restricted from doing so, but just chose not to lest what goes around comes around.

  • So, since they would not "donate" the money if they did not display only their product, is Intel donating or buying the support of Harvard? Should they be able to make that a tax write off since it is really becoming a form of advertisement?

  • Re:No free lunch (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Intel does deserve blame here. It is absolutely unreasonable to have such anti-competitive expectations. In addition, Apple DONATED many of those iMacs when Intel REFUSED to donate any equipment to the same lab. So this is how Apple gets rewarded for no-strings attached charity? To others - it is not an Apple/PC argument - it is about conflict of interest in education, and the way tech companies are only too eager to manipulate schools for selfish reasons. They are NOT salesrooms.
  • But remember... Harvard is an independant institution, and some departments (Harvard Science Center - media-services department, 90% Mac based) probably couldn't function when placed under that restriction (just think what would happen if your company/school wasn't allowed to use 9/10 computer s for a few days).

    I know here at my University there are classes that just wouldn't run... because the entire thing takes place in the Mac labs. That's bad for students. Some of them may behind as is, and being FORCED to have unproductive classes ain't helping. This is education, remember?
  • The moral conflict being refered to is that corporatization directly violates the enlightenment philosophy of education. This philosophy has for many been internalized and taken for granted as the foundation for American education to the point it can not be well articulated. What it basically says ( although has not often achieved ) is: a. education is a forum to exchange contrasting ideas and let reason and the scientific method prove what is to the best of our knowledge correct. With the explicit assumption that all ideas be given equal opportunity open expression and to succeed or fail on their own merits. b. Human beings can and should better themselves as human beings through education and that it is a process not a diploma. Although application of these principals has been historically spotty by at least asserting they were the ideal allowed for a lot to happen. Although we still as I said earlier presume these to still be the case in practice they have for the most part long since passed by the wayside. I won't even begin to rant about what it has become. Anyway to make a short story long these exclusive contracts impinge upon the concept of open expression by limiting choice and opening the institution to intellectual extortion such as having to ban or hide competitors existence on the campus. What if the University enters into exclusive contract with amazon.com and they refuse to stock products that critisize them that could be assigned in legal, business or pr ethics classes. (they still have such classes don't they?)

    "Never let your schooling interfere with your education" -Samuel Clemens

  • Ghost ? A Mac ? No, it's rather easier than that (cheaper too): Configure (but do not personalize a Mac). Boot it from a system CD, copy hard drive to an Appleshare volume. Next Mac: reformat the drive and copy the previous image down. Presto ! And requires no additional software.
  • *gets up on same soap box*
    Schools used to be a place for learning how to live. They don't teach anything about life anymore <mumble>they don't teach anything anymore</mumble>, everybody's too scared that their kids need protecting. If you protect them from the relativly controlled atmosphere of school how are they ever supposed to learn how to survive in the real world where there are no teachers to run to?

    In high school I took Driver's Education, the closest we got to driving in that class was navigating the halls to get to the room. Sure, I learned lots of driving theories, and about how to park with out breaking any laws. Now if I were less than 3 years away from driving when I took this class it may have been more helpful. But either way it did not and could not teach me how to drive, the only way to do that is to get into a car, start it up, and hope you dont kill anybody (yourself included).

    This soap box is getting shaky and I have to get back to work, so you can figure out what I was going to say next without me...


    Devil Ducky
  • Not only does iMac support removable media, but portable/removable media drives. Is this not superior to all other desktops in terms of portability? The iMac even has a handle on the back of it!

    When will people realize that floppies are obsolete?
  • Try using Intel's practices yourself!

    Become a Tupperware(tm) salesperson.

    Offer free Tupperware products to a friend or acquaintance if they will host a "party" where you can demonstrate products and make a sales pitch.

    Show up early and tell your friend to hide all of the GladWare that they usually serve snacks in, and please not to even open the cupboard where they're kept.

    Be prepared for a short career.

  • The problem is that Linux isn't (currently) easy to learn and even if it ever became so the mem is burnt in..
    Just as people think Linux is hard to use and hard to admin (Linux was NEVER hard to use... this implys difficulting on Linux experts... and that isn't the case... the difficulty is clearly on the new users who have yet to learn Linuxes obscure and cryptic commands).

    Mac is very powerful but just as Linux is forever tagged with the "Hard" lable Mac is forever tagged with the "simple" lable...
    Still it's pointed out time and time again the reason people pick Windows over Linux is Windows is "user friendly" it's not but it is easy to learn and thats a big step forward for newbes comparied to Linux...
    But NOT comparied to Mac.. who really is user friendly..

    So Linux scoops up the geeks, the techs and the power users and Mac scoops up the newbes and the techno paranoid...

    It's got it's place in things....

    And unlike Windows... Mac and Linux work together perfictly...
    Mac has made the extra effort to work with Unix for a long time.. Older Macs have become Internet terminals in otherwise Unix networks.
    Linux also makes an extra effort to work with Mac.. supporting AppleTalk protocalls at the kernel level.

    On a network I doupt you could easly recognise where the Macs end and the Linux boxes start...
    Or pick the odd box in a stack of systems...

    For me an ideal office network is Macs and Linux boxes... between the two all needs are meet
  • My school (UMASS at Amherst) is a good example of the effects of corporate sponsorship of education. A "generous" donation from Nike or Coca-Cola comes with a heavy price: the corporation expects and demands broad control over University policy and culture. In the last year:
    - Nike has promised to withdraw all funding since we (students) convinced the administration to join the Workers Rights Coalition (an anti-sweatshop group).
    - Coca-Cola and Starbucks have demanded and enforced expensive monopolies on all beverages sold on campus. The administration has also harassed students gathering signatures for the Ecopledge, a pledge not to work for a list of socially irresponsible companies which includes Coca-Cola.
    - The administration has ignored the protests of students and professors by letting the Folett Group of Chicago skim profits from the Universities bookstores in return for undefined increases in "efficiency" (layoffs). Protesters against Folett must apply for a permit and gather in a confined space far from the bookstore or the Chancellor's residence.
    Corporations who give to educational institutions don't just want recognition. They openly seek to stifle the free speech and progressive activism that make colleges more than short sighted training camps for career skills.
  • Agreed. When I went to the State U. of New York at Buffalo, corporate sponsorship ran across campus like wildfire. Public universities are especially susceptible to this because they don't have as many rich alumni to donate buildings and such. Of course, Coke signed a deal with the university which banned all other soft drinks from being sold on campus. Computer companies sold the university tons of equipment at very cheap prices, as long as their equipment was the only kind used in the public computing facilities. I now live in Stony Brook, NY, home to another big state university center. A local company (Computer Associates, if you're wondering) is essentially buying the campus. The CEO is "donating" a building, and the computer science department is essentially a CA employee factory. I'm out of college now, but I see this happen every day. It can't be good in the long run. I can see things like this leading to a loss of impartiality in education, and ultimately a lack of choice for university officials. For example, if you know Dell computers are pieces of crap, but Dell just donated 1,500 workstations to you, and you're the president of a cash-strapped public university, do you take the donation or look elsewhere?
  • And why should we expect that Intel shouldn't want an "exclusive" event? Really, it's a tradeoff. I'm sure that Intel (or any other company for that matter) isn't donating money sheerly out of the kindness of its collective heart. There are strings attached.

    Is the entire University part of said event? All of it? That really doesn't make that much sense to me...

    For example, Intuit used to (perhaps still does) donate Quicken software to high schools for use in personal finance classes. Not just because Intuit wants high school students to have balanced checkbooks (yeah, right), but because when those same students need to buy software, they will buy the software they already know.

    Yes, but note that Intel didn't donate a bunch of processors to the school. (well maybe they did but it wasn't mentionned anywhere). You'll note that Intuit, Corel, and other companies who donate software don't actually ask for anything in return, they just assume it will happen (which it will). Had Intel donated a few (a lab) of PCs, then more people would use them and consequently buy them in the future... Note that this is not what happened. Intel is using a M$-like bullying tatic. Bad. Bad Intel. Stop being mean.

    Same for Intel, they are doing it partly for charity, mostly for good PR.

    And WHOA BOY did they fail! Gotta laugh at this one just a bit. A Yahoo story like this isn't going to get more Intel PCs bought... perhaps more AMD or Transmeta....
  • Uhh, ever hear of USB? It works just fine for that, and look, ooh, I can use my USB Zip on my PC and my Mac, but not my Linux machine. I know, they're working on it.

    People often ask me why I buy macs and PC's and run every OS I can. The answer is so I can keep learning all sorts of interesting things. And besides, I'm getting to like the Mac even more. You can back up with a USB tape drive, if they exist (I'm sure they do.) Or, perhaps, a program like Ghost (hard drive images), onto a LAN.

    I'm still disappointed at the academics and/or administration at Harvard bowing to any pressure, that separation from the "real world" is a key part of academia. That said, an iMac kiosk, if the Intel marketers had any intelligence whatsoever, they could say something like, "Use your Mac for browsing, but use the new Intel Sextium chip for QUAKE 3!!!"

    Anyway.

    later
  • That would have been te Sydney IT2000 / LinuxExpo 2000. The two conferences were sort of combined. Microsoft didn't just threaten to not turn up, AFAIK there was no sign of them at all! And this was right before the official launch of Win2k too! Though I don't think they were ever going to sponsor the event..
  • Isn't it about time people realize that if Havard, or whoever is at the blunt of slashdot complaints, didn't want to cover them, they didn't have to? It was requested, and they thought it might be a good idea.

    No... note that the spokesperson for Harvard said: "[but we were] asked in a way that we couldn't say no." That says bullying to me....

    Can't we just all grow up? You didn't like it when your parents made you share, now you don't have to, but you're telling other people they have to share, you're just like your parents.

    Maybe one doesn't like sharing, but that doesn't mean it's bad. Maybe Mom and Dad were right...
  • This is just sad. When a school such as Harvard, which has the largest endowment of any school in the nation would even to stop to consider such petty antics, it speaks poorly for the backbones of our universities in general.

    all persons, living and dead, are purely coincidental. - Kurt Vonnegut
  • Intel is as bad as Microsoft or perhaps worse when it comes to monopolistic practices.


    But here we are punishing just Microsoft and accepting Intel.

    Can we avoid Intel? Personally, my lab is completely Intel and Microsoft free.


    I do own x86 based computers but they have the processor from AMD.


    By the way, the boxes running Slashdot powered by Intel?


    Also I dont understand why VA Linux dont make any non-intel boxes?

    Their sales person just confirmed to me that they do not have any non-Intel CPU products at this time.


    I dont think I will be looking forward to VA clustercity for the time being. I might get Alphas.

  • If M$ gets split, Apple will port its OS to x86.

    Very unlikely... Why would they kill their own business (almost only hardware) for such a risky move ? Who would buy Macintosh hardware if cheap PC clones running MacOS would do the job ? OK, the Mac architecture is better than PC's one, but the percentage of people who really care about that is marginal.

    Moreover, you're talking about x86. Think about it : if MS is ever split (which I really doubt), it will not be before 2001 or even 2002. By that time (I hope I'm not thinking wishfully), x86 will be out and replaced by the Intel 64 bits Itanium architecture. Would Apple issue a MacOS X version just for old computers ? MacOS' market was always high end desktop machines, why would they suddenly care about oldest PC's ?

    Stéphane

    Have you checked out Badtech [badtech.com] The daily online cartoon?
    Have you checked out Badtech [badtech.com] The daily online cartoon?

  • There was an extensive critique of university funding and its sources in the March 2000 Atlantic Monthly; it is online here [theatlantic.com]. I agree with timholman, universities have been on the take for years. The university budgets and priorities are driven by research needs and not by some idealistic devotion to learning and tutelage.

    I don't like Intel's actions here, but the guy holding the pursestrings gets to call the shots. It seems like they could have been more discreet about it, though.

  • The whole brand specific options do get old after a little while. I know that we've heard on more than one occasion that we can't get food we actually like on campus because "we have a contract with their competitor." Do they really think that we care who their manager owns stock in and therefor has us in a contract with? All we want is our Lucky Charms so that when the food is crap we can at least have cereal that we like. This from a company who's motto is: "We want students to eat here because they want to, not because they have to."

  • Been to the movies lately? Have you ever noticed that when a movie is set on Earth, in the U.S., in the present day, whenever a character uses a computer, it's always an iMac, or some kind of Mac?

    Not hard to explain: movie types are mostly mac-users in the first place, so it's only natural that they's put macs in the movies.


    --
    Here's my mirror [respublica.fr]

  • In reference to the whole computers for education spending shindig going on lately, i dont know about your schools, but the ones they supplied ours with absolutely and utterly blow. I tried to load a 186 meg ASF of Spaceballs up and the Celery 433 w/ 32megs PC-66 RAM chugged away at the issue for a solid 15 minutes before i just gave up and ripped the CD out of the drive. There are five of these computers in every science class. IMHO, it would have been much more worth it to purchase 1 or 2 nice computers (Pentium III's or so) instead of 5 stripped down calculators. So thumbs down to the school systems.

  • There's this company named AMD......

    Mike Roberto (roberto@soul.apk.net [mailto]) -GAIM: MicroBerto
  • Here in Korea, you can't publish any advertisement which compares products of one company with products of another company directly, whether it's true or not. I don't think it's allowed in the U.S. also.

    You can in the United States (it's very common), but it is not allowed in many parts of Europe.
  • Yeah...I noticed that after I posted the other correction... :-)

    --
  • Remember the first revisions of Mac AGP G4s had Intel ethernet controller chips. For that matter my Mac IIci has ROMs burned by Intel.

  • It's all a bit sad a certainly, and in the UK we're starting to have to deal with this a lot more in the education environment.

    I guess - you want the money/ resources - you strike a deal with Babylon.

    Trouble is these guys have hardened sales people trained to cut hard deals day in day out, and academics, well they have other things to deal with (and would prefer to spend their time doing). I expect schools and universities are going to get burnt frequently until they start hiring hardened full time marketing people to cut these kind of deals.

    (minor rant tinged with sadness..) Ok so put the boot in on European social welfare models of economy, but hey at least when it works it protects the education sector from having to do this kind of dealing rather than educating people...sigh... (off rant)

  • Intel gives money to harvard, harvard becomes intels bitch. what is so hard to understand?

    .{redmist}.
    -------------------------------------------------
  • AMD must set a standard even if it means staying number two. If their standard becomes THE STANDARD they stand to gain MUCH. If their standard is not embraced by the masses what have they lost? They stay number two. It's Intel's game to lose... AMD just has to keep playing and wait for the leader to stumble...

  • "That 'Lending distinction to the school' means that you attract more students so can afford more staff, it's a jungle out there where the modern
    university has to fight for every single student"

    And it is a real drag when students pay +20,000.00 grand a year to have Professor Arrogant's class taught by an unintelligible graduate assistant because Prof Arrogant is too busy sleeping off last night's facilty party in honor of his last publication. Half of my college professors suffered from the inability to teach the classes they are being paid for.

    "OK so there are fools out there who believe that if people are not out there working to improve the state of industry then they're wasting their time. but a lot of arts graduates take up a useful role in society someone has to make the TV programs you watch, someone has to look after the homeless (Unless you think it should all be down to policemen with clubs)"

    Who said anything bad about arts graduates? (Although I think some would take issue with your about their place in society involving TV production). Reread my post. And that bit with the homeless, slow down with the coffee! Reread the original post and try again.

    "Universitys are not First and foremost industries, they mainly exist to educate and enhance the culture of the society in which they are based."

    And most private universities are in trouble financially because their ivory tower view of "enhancing the culture" is at total odds with reality.

    "narrowing the spectrum of teaching into purely what would be useful for industry and therefore make money would make our institutions a shadow of themselves"

    Universities are already a shadow of themselves. Pick a problem.. elimination of testing and grading systems, admission based upon color rather than achievment, sexual harrassment, etc.. need I go on?

  • Hey moron, some people want just that. Take me for instance. I made my computer by buying every indivual piece (down to the internal fans and cables). Whenever a part fails or goes obsolete, I find a good deal on a replacement. I've been doing that for years now.

    I never bought a floppy drive or SCSI card for my machine. There wasn't a need. What would I need a floppy drive for? To install windows? Linux installations can boot from the CD. Floppies, besides being small and unreliable (I used to have one fail on me practically every week, when I needed them at high school) are also agonizingly slow. I have a CD burner and a Zip 250, and I don't even use 'em much. Any file transfer/storage I need to do I do on my home ethernet, or across the internet.

    I'd love to have a nice fast SCSI adapter, but they're just too expensive, so I can go without.

    --
    grappler
  • Actually Apple has always enjoyed a large segment of the education market. In fact these [apple.com] are the most recent numbers. Anecdotally I would say that, at least when I was an undergrad, that institutions of higher ed are not as wintel centric as , say, corporate America. Keeping in mind that this was at a university I would say that Intel had reasonable motivation to be jerks. Of course, they should have also been a bit less childish after the first "no" from Harvard.
  • Now, AMD have x86-64/Sledegammer sitting there - fully backwards compatible, but extended. Also, if current form continues, better bang per buck.

    AMD has gained some credibility in the last months, but I really doubt they are strong enough to dictate the plateform the average Joe will use in the future.

    Now, who's _honestly_ going to buy something that's slower for the price, and where the performance sucks even more for everything you've got right now - the only benefit is with stuff months down the line?

    Slower and sucking performance... That's another big assumption ;)
    Moreover, who still cares about real, measured performance ? The recent 1Ghz hoopla (even if it eventually turned in the favor of AMD) shows that what's really important is the marketing, the eye candy. Those chips were 'simple' Athlons/PIII's, but 1Ghz sounded sooooo sweet.

    I first though about writing 2 lines about AMD in my original posting, but the topic has been discussed so many times before : we finally have the possibility to get rid of this x86 mess. It took Intel 15 years to give us a non-x86 processor. I really hope the market won't perpetuate x86's hegemony by buying Sledgehammers.
    When Intel decided to help porting Linux to the IA64, they made it clear that open source OSes can help the transition : when most of the applications just need a recompilation to work on a new platform, the pain of migration disappears magically !

    Stéphane

    Have you checked out Badtech [badtech.com] The daily online cartoon?
    Have you checked out Badtech [badtech.com] The daily online cartoon?
  • Yes. It used to be illegal in the US. I'm not sure when the change-over occurred(somewhere near the early 90's I believe).

    I also remember as a kid things like the obvious Tide box with it's name covered and the ad saying something akin to "Our stuff beats the leading brand."

    Now companies aren't restricted from naming competitors in their ads.

    "Four out of five of my fingers recommend using gum before breathing near me."

    D
  • Around here we have seemingly hundreds of computers with a "Donated by Intel" sticker on them. So many that recently we lost a cluster of 30 or so fine Macs to be displaced by PC's. And a couple years ago we lost about 120 Macs in one place to be bumped out by Intel donated machines.

    Just another note of what's going on.

    It's stupid and it pisses me off.

  • this is just ridiculous (Score:4)

    by fluxrad ( 125130 ) on Monday June 12, 2000 @02:24AM (#1009302)
    guest: what was that thing over there?

    really smart harvard guy: what thing? (acting nonchalant)

    guest: that thing...it looks like an imac with a cover over it?!?!

    really smart harvard guy: that...uh...that was a pigeon!


    FluX
    After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its deevolution into the shiny things network

  • How do you think they got to be so rich? Greedy people/institutions tend to have more money than those who aren't so greedy.

  • Coke / Pepsi, too! (Score:4)

    by Animol ( 120579 ) <jartis&gmail,com> on Monday June 12, 2000 @02:28AM (#1009309) Journal
    A lot of the same stuff (brand wars) is going on in junior high and high schools with Pepsi and Coke - Not just early advertising, but downright force of product in order to get donations. Is it just me, or is brand-consciousness going WAAAAY overboard here?
    It's not like Intel was totally in the wrong in not wanting competitor products in the faces of the participants, but this kind of in-your-face no-holds-barred product endorsement smells almost like extortion to me.
  • They weren't 100% right. Obviously they didn't want all the jokes along the lines of "Hey, did you see all those Macs in the intel publicity pictures".

    Unfortunately they still insisted that preventing these jokes was more important to them than what they were funding. They should have backed down when they found that they were causing too much hassle. Partly out of consideration for others and aprtly out of good PR.
  • Here [thecrimson.com] is a link to the story from The Crimson, Harvard's newspaper.
  • Obviously you're saying that sponsors should not expect any kind of exclusivity as a result of their donations. This is self-evident -- to the person receiving the donations. To a corporation, geared towards a culture of short-term gain, the long-term goal of better educated workers is overridden by a short-term desire for good publicity for the corporation.

    I would rather corporations making donations to educational institutions expected no short-term return at all: no publicity, no co-branded buildings or labs. But little-picture corporate leadership could never let that happen, sadly. If a university sells out, it should expect to face the consequences.

    I wish there was another source of funding for universities and organizations that didn't involve selling out... but there isn't.

  • Don't forget the present day of education as depicted in the very funny episode "Lisa Gets an A." Courtesy of the Simpsons Archive:

    • Principal Skinner: (looking in classroom) We can buy real periodic tables instead of these promotional ones from Oscar Meyer.
    • Mrs. Krabappel: Who can tell me the atomic weight of bolognium?
    • Martin: (raises hand) Ooh, delicious?
    • Mrs. Krabappel: Correct. I would have also accepted "snacktacular."
  • Oh yeah, I remember spitting out coffee through my nose on one particular morning - a headline in the newspaper read: "Student suspended for wearing Pepsi shirt on 'Coke day'"

    Some high school had some coke executives coming over giving the school a bunch of money. They took a picture with the students, and right before it was snapped, a kid took his shirt off. Underneath, he had a blue and white shirt with a Pepsi logo over the left breast. The school suspended him, it made newspaper headlines across the country.

    Later, a Pepsi spokesman was asked for comment on the story. He said, "This kid obviously has very good taste" ;-)

    --
    grappler
  • Gosh, it'd be wonderful if teachers didn't *have* to unionise to protect themselves.

    They really have little choice. The school boards and government ministries are incredibly abusive toward their employees.

    Without unions, class sizes would be enormous, teachers would not have lunch breaks because they'd have to monitor the schoolyard, extracurricular activity coaching would be mandatory and wages would be more abysmal than they already are.

    As long as teachers are employees of a hostile employer, they'll have to be unionised. That's really unfortunate.

    --
  • Well my school didn't have recognized frats & sororities because they don't permit anyone who applies to join. And as it happens, many of the students don't really like them anyway.

    OTOH, we didn't have a football team anymore either, because except for about 50 years ago, they haven't really tried to recruit athletes. It was a lousy school for that; there was one race that I remember our team only beat another team that was unable to finish altogether. ;)

  • This isn't totally off-topic, but since we're talking about brand exposure for Apple...

    Been to the movies lately? Have you ever noticed that when a movie is set on Earth, in the U.S., in the present day, whenever a character uses a computer, it's always an iMac, or some kind of Mac?

    I saw Road Trip the other day. In both Josh and Tiffany's dorms, they have iMacs. The characters never use them, but the colourful neon green plastic looming in the background is unmistakeable. In Whatever It Takes, the characters who send email to each other use iMacs. Heck, in Independence Day, a Mac laptop is used to create and upload a "virus" to an alien computer.

    It seems that, either by giving money to Hollywood Studios and asking them to include Macs, or supplying Macs to the studios as props, Apple is trying to make it so that when the general public thinks "computer", they think "iMac" or "Macintosh".

    Of course, this isn't true of all movies -- remember the "hybrid" computers in Office Space?

    This probably isn't as outlandish as it seems-- I'm sure Coke is responsible for characters in certain movies drinking Coke and Pepsi is responsible for other movies showing Pepsi vending machines and Pepsi trucks...

    Has anyone else noticed this?

  • What I am saying is that it is ethically wrong for an educational facility to put the aquisition of mony above the quality and consistency of its education.

    I believe this is the case whether the money being pursued is corporate or from taxpayers (i.e., teachers indoctrinating students to push their parents to vote in favor of bond measures).

    Don't get me wrong; educators are entitled to make a living. However, they should be primarily interested in turning out well-rounded, educated youth.

    --

  • You're missing the point; what I am saying is that increasingly, educational institutions are being run by people whose primary concern is revenue generation. Whether that be corporate arrangements, or higher taxes as a result of bond debt, it is eclipsing fundamentals.

    Wow. I managed to piss off both sides...I must be doing something right! :-)

    --

  • I love the Catholic school system -- heck, I'm a product of it -- but you have to be fair: (a) Catholic schools are always hurting for adequate facilities and (b) a significant fraction of their faculties are religious, with a noticeably lower cost in salaries, benefits, etc.

    But that's *exactly* my point. That despite lower costs and lesser facilities, they turn out better educated students.

    I'm really just trying to argue that the focus on funding is somewhat misguided. You need a certain baseline level of money, and beyond that, you're not going to see any educational benefits.

    --

  • I misspelled 'acquisition'.

    But I went to public school, so there you go... :-)

    --

  • Has anyone seen the episode of the Simpsons where Lisa is shown a vision of her life in the future? They show a clip of the futuristic education system, where the schools are all networked together.

    School teacher appears on the monitor.
    [teacher]"Today's lesson is sponsored by Pepsi, the Choice of a New Generation. If I have 5 Pepsi's, and I give two Pepsi's to Jane, how many Pepsi's do I have left? ... You, in Cleveland..."?
    [little girl]"Pepsi?"
    [teacher]"Partial Credit"

    Funny, but also sad at the same time :-)

  • I don't think so (Score:5)

    by Brian Knotts ( 855 ) <.moc.sseccaedacsac. .ta. .sttonkb.> on Monday June 12, 2000 @03:49AM (#1009358)
    Ok so put the boot in on European social welfare models of economy, but hey at least when it works it protects the education sector from having to do this kind of dealing rather than educating people...sigh...

    But we in the U.S. had schools free of this nonsense for two hundred years.

    I think it has little to nothing to do with our economic model; I think it has to do with a declining sense of morals and ethics among educators, and really among people in general.

    It's simply ethically wrong for a school to enter into these types of arrangements. But the focus in education in the U.S. over the past twenty years has been money, money, money. The teachers' unions have been pushing for more money every election, despite the obvious fact that money (above a certain baseline) has no relationship to the quality of education. Our most horrendous schools in the U.S. happen to be in the school districts (like Washington, D.C.) with the highest per-student expenditures.

    Our privately-run schools tend to do a much better job, while spending a fraction of the money of the state-run schools. The figures from a few years back were, I think, in Los Angeles, $7,200 per student in the L.A. Unified School District vs. $3,000 per student in the Catholic schools there. And the Catholic schools were turning out better educated students, even though they also had a reasonable share of economically disadvantaged students.

    --

  • And why should we expect that Intel shouldn't want an "exclusive" event? Really, it's a tradeoff. I'm sure that Intel (or any other company for that matter) isn't donating money sheerly out of the kindness of its collective heart. There are strings attached.

    For example, Intuit used to (perhaps still does) donate Quicken software to high schools for use in personal finance classes. Not just because Intuit wants high school students to have balanced checkbooks (yeah, right), but because when those same students need to buy software, they will buy the software they already know.

    Same for Intel, they are doing it partly for charity, mostly for good PR. Why would they want to have a photo of their CEO or whoever is speaking at the event standing in front of a roomful of iMacs? Sort of like having Ray Kroc (sp? from McDonalds) giving a speech about Big Macs in front of a Burger King banner.

    Basically, is everyone here just looking for something to complain about? Seems like it to me.

  • see it (Score:5)

    by jbarnett ( 127033 ) on Monday June 12, 2000 @03:57AM (#1009363) Homepage

    Intel Guy: If you can't see them, they can't see you

    Havard Guy: Uh? Are you referering to the Macs?

    Intel Guy: They don't exist, if I can't see them they don't exist

    Havard Guy: Sure they do look [removing cover to reveal an iMac]

    Intel Guy: PUT IT BACK ON!!!! PUT IT BACK ON!!!!

    Havard Guy: [quickly re-covers the iMac]

    Intel Guy: [starts rocking back and forth] STEVE JOBS IS THE CATCHER IN THE RYE, STEVE JOBS IS THE CATCHER IN THE RYE, STEVE JOBS IS THE CATCHER IN THE RYE!

    Havard Guy: Are you alright Sir, can I get you a glass of water or something?!?

    Intel Guy: [is still rocking back and forth] STEVE JOBS IS THE CATCHER IN THE RYE, STEVE JOBS IS THE CATCHER IN THE RYE, STEVE JOBS IS THE CATCHER IN THE RYE!

    Havard Guy: Please settle down, can I get your anything, you want to sit down, a glass of water?

    Intel Guy: [still rocking back and forth] THEY DON'T EXIST, MY CEO TOLD ME SO, THEY DON'T EXIST, MY CEO TOLD ME SO. THEY TOOK US INTO A ROOM AND GAVE US THESE SUGAR CUBES AND MADE US WATCH IMACS GET BROKEN AND SMASHED. THE VIDEO HAD MILLIONS OF MACS GETTING DESTORIED, THEY SAID THEY DESTORIED ALL OF THEM, THEY SAID THEY DON'T EXIST!! THEY DON'T EXIST, MY CEO TOLD ME SO, STEVE JOBS IS THE CATCHER IN THE RYE!

    Havard Guy: [being sly] the Mac's died in the 1990's when Intel realsed the pentium that destoried them all [??]

    Intel Guy: [shaking and in a cold sweat] what is going on, where am I, what happened?

  • Why Intel Wins (Score:4)

    by Effugas ( 2378 ) on Monday June 12, 2000 @04:35AM (#1009364) Homepage
    The point is not that Intel took some hits from demanding that these iMacs be convered. The point is that any other college budget approver, looking to see what he can do to optimize funding, may fear purchasing an iMac because Intel may pass them over.

    That's the idea. Buy Apple, and your students suffer. Buy Intel, and your bribe is on its way.

    There's a strong difference, of course, between the certainly legitimate and healthy educational activism of Intel and straight bribery. What Intel's staff failed to recognize was that by harassing Harvard's staff, they converted whatever positive good will they could get from the event into a negative, tainted force.

    Fear can buy you alot. Respect buys you more. That's a hard lesson to learn; hopefully Intel will learn from this. Paranoid responsibility is valuable. Paranoid violence leads to the very press-connected Harvard getting harassed. Oops.

    They'll learn. It's in their character--or at least, it was. If it still ain't, well, AMD can pop open some champagne glasses...

    Yours Truly,

    Dan Kaminsky
    DoxPara Research
    http://www.doxpara.com
  • That's a big assumption, and one I wouldn't want to make

    Intel want us to move to IA64/Itanium - but it's not a straightforward migration path and it's not too clever re: performance of legacy stuff - or, at least, wasn't last time I heard.

    Now, AMD have x86-64/Sledegammer sitting there - fully backwards compatible, but extended. Also, if current form continues, better bang per buck.

    Now, who's _honestly_ going to buy something that's slower for the price, and where the performance sucks even more for everything you've got right now - the only benefit is with stuff months down the line?

    Intel could well have dropped the ball here. I'd honestly reckon AMD's route has an equal - at worst - chance of success.

  • Harvard should have realized that they do in fact have a great deal of power here. They could easily have said- "No we will not cover the Macs, and if you insist, then you can just pull your money out of here."

    Intel would have caved completely. Imagine the press reporting that Intel refused to sponsor Harvard because they would not cover the Macs.

    Seems like the problem here is cowardice on both sides. Remember that bullies are as much cowards as those who don't stand up to them.
  • For some reason you left out 'wether that be trade unions primarily interested in tenure and long term compensation for the teaching staff' up there where you were bloodying the corporations and taxpayers.

    You must have missed my other responses, then.

    Teaching should be a profession, not a trade. Teachers should not be unionised.

    I absolutely agree.

    In fact, I believe that should be the case for all government employees.

    --

  • Oh, and I'm rather confused about where I was "bloodying the taxpayers." I don't think I said anything that would even remotely suggest that I don't think taxpayers are paying enough. I am saying that they are paying too much.

    --
  • Last time I checked, universities were supposed to be about teaching and research, not holding trade shows.


    The irony of course is that Intel has just annoyed a bunch of students with their trade show - students going to a prestigious university. Now, what kind of impression have they made?


    And the professors? How inclined are they now to trust Intel technology? Want to bet that 90%-use-of-Mac may just increase?


    Lesson for Intel: Bad for customers, bad for you in the end.

  • Harvard already lacks adequate computer facilities. The labs are always filled and far too small. The SC kiosks are one of the few places on campus were you can easily check your E-mail during the day. Otherwise you have to go all the way back to your dorm. The kiosks get a lot of use and are very convenient. To think that the students would give them up because there is a conference nearby is silly. As far as Harvard goes the Science Center is a "public" space. The conference was sharing the space just like the Greenhouse does, just like the Cabot library does, just like the numerous classrooms, labs, and lecture halls in the building do.

    The media lab in question (that the yahoo/ZDNet article mentioned) is pretty far down the hall and around a bend from where the conference was. Actually quite a walk aways. And it has glass windows so if you looked closely perhaps you could see a Mac. To think that they papered over these windows is just stupid.

    btw, I've always thought the SC was a poor place to hold a conference.
  • Intel asked that Harvard put covers on the iMacs.. That was reasonable enough.
    But the covers made the iMacs overheat.. The iMacs case is mostly airvents... hard to cover without blocking that...

    Harvard should have taken the covers back to Intel and told them what was wrong. They didn't.
    Intel didn't ask them to turn iMacs off.. They told them to cover same. It was purely a university choice to turn the iMacs off...

    I'm shure Intel when faced with it would have backed down and said ok leave the iMacs alone.

    This is the truely scary part.. Not so much what Intel asked but that the University took action in the name of Intel..

    I think this should be noted...
    Schools are waisting money on stuff not needed.. local governments trying to ballence budgets won't allocate needed funds... lots of evil money issues that a sponsership quickfix can help handle.
    But at what cost?

    Universitys are teaching ethical behavure (a function I an allready conserned about) now that ethical behavure is up for sale.. what shall we teach the new workforce...
    (Coffie/Cola) Work ethics.. yes this is good.. but then we can forget to teach about sleep depervation. No Coke-a-cola wouldn't ask that but the Universitys would do it anyway...

    It's not just that companys are paying money and asking something in return. Thats bad enough...
    But Intel, Coke, and so forth would avoid asking anything that could turn into bad press...
    But education institutions want to look good to the sponsers.. They don't consider the bad press they could generate for same...

    So Harvard turns iMacs off for Intel...
    Ispocan University removes all refrence to sleep depervation for a coffie sponser...
    And Hoho Collage forgets you can get sports injurts even with protective gear for a company that sells same.

    It's not what they asked for.. It's what they do on there own that scares me....

  • oh come on. (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    it's an intel sponsored event.

    if they hadn't asked for the macs to be taken out of view, people would be posting about how stupid they were to have an event surrounded by kiosks provided by their competition.

    They weren't saying to get rid of the macs forever, just put them out of sight for the event.

    I don't see any problem here. Hardly up to par with some other things big evil companies are doing these days.

  • Here in Korea, you can't publish any advertisement which compares products of one company with products of another company directly, whether it's true or not. I don't think it's allowed in the U.S. also.

    You can in the United States (it's very common), but it is not allowed in many parts of Europe.

    A correction: It is legal to compare products directly in the U.S., but only if the comparison is true. Otherwise the offending company can be charged with False Advertising, a serious enough offense that it is avoided. However, the ad execs know how to get their point across and what results is more creative ways of saying "Our product is better than theirs" or strange attempts at confusing the consumer enough to buy their product.

  • Does it make sense to inconvenience students paying major dough and hamper people working on other donors' grant money so that one mid level manager can light up an exploding PR cigar?

    Last time I checked, universities were supposed to be about teaching and research, not holding trade shows.

  • I submitted this story, with the link to the less-sensational Crimson story, several days ago. It got rejected, I guess I should have looked around for something written with more editorial content.

    2000-06-09 14:45:45 Intel makes Harvard hide iMacs during Intel-sponsored event (articles,intel) (rejected)

    Normally I bypass all these posts too, but I used to get my news from Slashdot, now I just see old news here. Can we get some submission guidelines written up, so we don't waste our time submitting things over and over again?

    To keep this relatively on topic, I don't think that Intel did it necessarily to hide their competitors products, but they could have made an effort to accomodate the students a little more, that's for sure.
    ---

  • The main computer lab in the Science Center is, if I remeber correctly, about 40% Ultrix on DEC Alphas, 40% Macs, and only about 10% or so PC's (as opposed to the public access terminals in question, in the lobby). I wonder what Intel though about that?

    The Imac kiosks in the main lobby (I remeber them as being mainly 7xxx's and 8xxx's, though, but it's been about 6 months since I was there) are basically Netscape and telnet boxes, locked down in such a way as to be useless as Macs, i.e., they are effectively dumb terminals, useful only for anonymous web surfing and telnetting to other systems (Harvard's main systems are Solaris and Ultrix).

    All things considered, Intel-based systems seem to be in the minority in the Science Center.

    darren


    Cthulhu for President! [cthulhu.org]

  • Direct link to Crimson story (Score:4)

    by embobo ( 1520 ) on Monday June 12, 2000 @02:29AM (#1009405) Homepage
    Direct link to Crimson Story [thecrimson.com] without all the inane Yahoo editorializing.
  • So: not content with being one of the biggest suppliers of CPUs to your average user, Intel don't even want to acknowledge that other suppliers exist.

    Pathetic. If you feel like it, why not point as many hacks as you can back to the original story? That should generate a fair amount of low-grade embarrasment for Intel for the next few weeks.

    Those with a little more spare time on their hands should check out Fred Hoyle's "A for Andromeda". As Lovecraft remarked, "The old ones are... the old ones".

    Love and kisses,

    Simon

    "Free Luna!"
  • I wonder if Intel has learnt anything from Microsoft - shutting down other machines on events that they "just sponsor", is like Microsoft forcing OEMs to only use IE, and treat them if they want to use Netscape ... Bad attitude Intel .. Will we see Intel bashing companies to use intel platforms instead of f.x Transmeta?
  • Sounds just like a recent IT conference I heard about in Sydney (Australia) where Microsoft threatened to pull out of doing some presentation and sponsering the conference because there were some Linux presentations.

    (sigh)

    (note: I heard this 3rd or 4th hand so don't flame me if it's rubbish) :)

  • True or not (Score:3)

    by RottenApple ( 10663 ) on Monday June 12, 2000 @02:35AM (#1009411) Homepage
    Well, there have been some articles like the one we talk about now.


    ["A company in the PC business" hindered Macs from public view, or access.]


    But.. I've never heard that the Apple did the similar thing ever.


    Are the companies in the PC business not moral, or the Apple people are stupid enough that they can't protect their business, or.. simply the article were just rumor?


    If it's true, it's very serious issue. Maybe it's worse case than the MS's dominance in the PC industry.

    Here in Korea, you can't publish any advertisement which compares products of one company with products of another company directly, whether it's true or not.
    I don't think it's allowed in the U.S. also.
    And.. the case we talk about is much more serious than that.


    Hmm..

  • Intel and Others: Out of touch (Score:4)

    by Badgerman ( 19207 ) on Monday June 12, 2000 @02:36AM (#1009413)
    Intel, Microsoft, AOL, other companies - we've seen them judged as evil, manipulating, grasping, etc. One trait that is not often considered is that they are also out of touch - and the case of the "Mac War" is an excellent example.

    Remove Macs in use in a department that's 90% Mac? Threaten to pull funding over a childish tiff? Forget any moral questions - how stupid can people be?

    This does nothing more than make people bitter and angry and make the company look bad. It's made national news, its been displayed here, and now Intel looks a bit stupider. Is anyone involved in this fiascon on the Intel side thinking?

    Some of the big Info/Tech/Soft companies remind me of companies in Hollywood - churning out product and making policy with no idea what's going on or what the repercussions are. I have to wonder how long they can dodge real life.
  • On the one side, you've got student-critical functionality.

    Uh, actually, no. Someone mentioned earlier that the other public terms on the first floor of the science center were left up and running. They're all Macs too. The ones that were off were sitting right in the middle of the exhibits. Secondly, there are two labs full of Macs in the basement, as well as IBM's and Alpha stations, all of which do everything that the iMacs do, and more. There is also another lab and the tech showcase on the first floor, right around the corner. No Harvard students suffered because of this, save for those two lazy to take the very nearly 15 stairs down to the basement (where there are chairs, unlike the kiosks upstairs). At most, it was a minor inconvenience, not a chilling threat to students ability to get connected. Comperable to when a dignitary visits, and we have to walk a block over or not shortcut through a yard because security has it locked down. I think that what Intel did was bad PR, but I think it's been blown way out of proportion.
  • [Guest walks over to iMac.]

    Guest: What's this?

    Really smart harvard guy: You can't touch that!

    [Guest turns on iMac. iMac melts into puddle of colored plastic from overheating.]

    The moral of this story: Don't put Intel's things where they don't belong.

    --

  • No free lunch (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Am I the only one who thinks that Intel was 100% right? They were the ones splashing the dosh so they had every right to ask for iMacs to be covered.

    This event cost a lot of money, and attracted a lot of attention. If you were paying big money to sponsor an event would you like your biggest competitor getting free advertising from your money?

    If Harvard does not like it, they should find sponsorshipt money from elsewhere. But I doubt that anyone would pay without asking for something in return.

  • Education and corporate sponsorship (Score:5)

    by GrayMouser_the_MCSE ( 192605 ) on Monday June 12, 2000 @02:40AM (#1009420)
    Actually, the really scary thing here has nothing do with Intel and market share, but how much an educational institution can be beholden to one of its benefactors. This was simply a case of a corportation donating money to a university, then dictating to that university how things ought to be run...

    As long as our educational institutions feel the need to play along with corporate sponsors, these situations will continue to occur. And with all the big money grants and donations available, more and more schools will feel the urge to get some of that money for themselves. Unfortunately, this can only hurt the students and faculty, ultimately.

    If an institution of higher learning is beholden to _any_ interest, corporate or otherwise, they can longer freely pursue their academic interests in _all_ avenues, if a free, unfettered way. That would be a greater blow to our freedom than anything MS or Intel or any other monopoly has done to date.

  • there is a little "situation" going on in the EECS (electrical engineering/computer science) deparment at UC Berkeley... Microsoft and some large peecee manufacturer made a deal with a professor to port the software he uses to teach CS 162 (OS) to Windows NT (from UNIX that works just FINE thank you) in exchange for some old laptops. that are only allowed to run NT. this pissed off some people, including a) the people who don't want to use them (me included -- I have a laptop. it runs Linux. I am NOT carrying a boat-anchor-luggable around in addition to my nice slim 4 lb. thinkpad) b) the people who don't want to support them, and c) the people who don't want to fix them (but who look like they're going to have to -- or find the money to have someone else do it).

    well, fine. that's at least reasonable, although I happen to not like it. let's look at the labs, however: the only hardware we can get at a reasonable price (or free) is stuff gotten from, say Dell or Compaq, that comes with an obligation to run Windows. there are profs trying to replace UNIX labs with windows labs. those labs magically become single-user stations (unstable ones at that). even on the very slow unix boxen, we have 10-15 people at a time using them, during the busy season. what happens when that is forcefully cut down to 1? nothing good, that's for sure.

    this is of course leaving out the whole issue of "tech support." there are people who do that. when they call tech support, it's with something like "there is THIS bug in your NFS/OS/whatever. please fix it NOW" -- this is, of course, if they don't have the source and can't fix it themselves. Microsoft is not known for being very responsive to this sort of call.

    any unix/linux/BSD companies/people who would like to donate hardware to our labs would be mighty welcome, but there haven't been many (if any) thus far. it would be a very sad thing if CS departments were forced into using windows of one form or another simply becasue they can't get hardware that doesn't have it tied to it.

    Lea
  • Apple is in an entirely different position from Intel, so of course they approach it differently. They are getting creamed in the market and most folks know what a small percentage of all boxes out there are from Apple, so covering up all the Intel boxes would be too obvious. The absence of Intel boxen would be far more noticeable than just letting them be. Apple instead wants to show that consumers have a choice, and that some of the folks (they'd like to say the cool ones, but, well, no) chose to use a Mac. Lots of places have only Intel, so boxing the cute little cubes from Mr. Jobs is not so obvious, and they'd prefer covered Macs to showing that folks have a choice and some chose Macs. Behavior of the small guy vs. behavior of the big guy.

    Same thing really as Coke vs. Pepsi. I see all of these ads where Pepsi claims this or that to be in some way superior to Coke, including a rebirth of the oh-so-annoying Pepsi-challenge. But you don't ever see Coke talking about being better than Pepsi in their ads. Or even mentioning Pepsi at all. THEY DON'T HAVE TO. They can just talk to a Coke dominated world and everything is OK.

    By the way, Apple funding of schools is not just altruism, schools are one of their best markets, and getting kids to grow up using Mac is one of the only ways they have continued to even be relevant, much less successful. I'd bet if you did a poll, an amazingly high percentage of all Mac users in the workforce used Apples in school, and just stuck with what they were comfy with.

    And Harvard uses Macs as much because they hate M$ as because they actually like iMacs. A valid choice, but their IT system is seriously odd and buggy because they just knee-jerk pick the other guy rather than actually thinking it through. (My company sold a software package to them, and they were a very needy customer, much worse than sites with 10x the deployed seats.) I'm surprised Intel was funding them.

    -reemul
  • A couple of things:
    But we in the U.S. had schools free of this nonsense for two hundred years.
    Technically true, as corporate sponsorship is a relatively new phenomenon (< 50 y or so). But money (in the form of wealthy donors) has always talked on campus. Heck, the University of Paris (one of the earliest) was beholden to (I believe) the King of France and tended to put out theological "proofs" that the crown was right in this or that squabble.

    The problem is, education is expensive, increasingly so, and we haven't figured out a funding model that preserves the schools' independence. Tuition will probably never cut it, alumni donations come with strings, state funding thrusts the school into the political minefield, and (as we see) corporate sponsorship leads to extortion.

    Also blockquoth the poster:

    The figures from a few years back were, I think, in Los Angeles, $7,200 per student in the L.A. Unified School District vs. $3,000 per student in the Catholic schools there.
    I love the Catholic school system -- heck, I'm a product of it -- but you have to be fair: (a) Catholic schools are always hurting for adequate facilities and (b) a significant fraction of their faculties are religious, with a noticeably lower cost in salaries, benefits, etc.

  • Hmmm. (Score:3)

    by hey! ( 33014 ) on Monday June 12, 2000 @04:51AM (#1009435) Homepage Journal
    Before Intel pulled this stunt, I had no idea that Harvard had public, iMac based Internet kiosks.

    Now there are probably lots of other people out there who are thinking that maybe a nicely styled iMac with a trackball would make a pretty nice and relatively inexpensive kiosk for their campuses.
  • As long as our educational institutions feel the need to play along with corporate sponsors, these situations will continue to occur. And with all the big money grants and donations available, more and more schools will feel the urge to get some of that money for themselves. Unfortunately, this can only hurt the students and faculty, ultimately.
    The damage has been going on for 30+ years already. The entire university landscape has been dramatically altered by the growth of federal research funding, and any large-scale corporate funding is not going to make things that much worse. As a faculty member in a research university, I can assure everyone that no university is going to think twice about getting money from wherever it can.

    My employer, like every other public university, never gets enough money from the state legislature. The only ways to deal with growing operating costs is (a) increased tuition or (b) grants and gifts. Rather than pass costs for new equipment on to the students, or beg for it from the legislature and Board of Regents, a school would much rather take a corporate donation.

    Faculty members and university administrators fully realize the potential conflicts, but taking money or equipment from a company like Intel is better than the alternative - no modern lab equipment or computers for the students. If you are unhappy about this situation, consider the alternative: Would you be willing to pay 2X tuition, or a 2% higher state sales tax, or a 5% higher state income tax, etc., to provide your state's public univerities with enough money? If not, then it's moot to complain about corporate influence in higher education.
  • What they learned was that many higher institutions can be bought out for the right price, as demonstrated by the "academic research" chairs many Fortune 500 companies have helped finance.

    And much like the Pepsi Arena, whomever's renting the tent for a show can drink whatever they like...those iMacs wouldn't have been covered if a "donation" by Steve Jobs had helped put paint new lines in the faculty parking lot.

  • Re:Coke / Pepsi, too! (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 12, 2000 @02:44AM (#1009441)
    this reminds me of an article/picture from a few months/years ago (vague enough for you?). It was a show on MSNBC where they were showcasing some webpage. The fun part was they the hosts were using a Mac, and even better, were using Netscape Navigator. Was fun to see a network that has "Micro$oft" in its name not only snubbing Internet Explorer, but Windows all-together. I remember the justification being that they used what worked best or was most economical.

    -Cheebus

    /So I haven't set up an account yet. Shoot me.

  • Boarding Call for the "B" Ark (Score:3)

    by Detritus ( 11846 ) on Monday June 12, 2000 @02:46AM (#1009443) Homepage
    I propose that we colonize Alpha Centauri. Marketing people, being so essential to our society, get to leave on the first ship, along with the telephone sanitizers and record company executives.

  • Apparently the Intel provided covers trapped heat, forcing the machines to not only be covered, but also powered down.

    Not only that, but you couldn't insert or remove a floppy, either...oh, wait...

    ------

  • What about Harvard's response? (Score:3)

    by tetrad ( 131849 ) on Monday June 12, 2000 @02:50AM (#1009449)
    Intel clearly is not making any friends here. It's a dumbheaded move that will do them more harm than good.

    But what about Harvard? If you look at the Crimson Online story [thecrimson.com], you'll see that the Computer Services (FACS) group diod not believe that covering the Macs was the right thing to do.

    According to the article:
    (1) "FASCS Director Franklin M. Steen said he felt the request unfairly impaired student usage."
    (2) "[Steen] allowed the computers to be covered 'only after multiple request and great reluctance.'"

    So if Harvard felt that this was wrong, why didn't they refuse the request? It's a prestigious, rich institution that could have afforded to tell Intel to take a hike. If Harvard has to kowtow to the corporate gods, what kind of hope is there for other academic institutions?

    They probably figured it wasn't worth fighting. That's their decision to make, but still, it's kinda sad.

  • Re:Education and corporate sponsorship (Score:3)

    by Windigo The Feral (N ( 6107 ) on Monday June 12, 2000 @01:05PM (#1009452)

    Refrag dun said (in regards to a thread on donors and stuff like frats):

    This sounds like a campus legend. In other words, it sounds like BS. It's very similar to a similar legend about why my university didn't have a football team.

    It may not be as large of an "urban legend" as you think. Cumberland College (a Baptist college in Williamsburg, KY) did not have a football team for some fifty years because one of the major donors to the college fund stipulated as a condition of her donations that the college NOT have a football team (her son had been killed in a football accident).

    Upon her death, the first thing Cumberland College did was set up a football team. :)

    (Yes, the college had other sports (basketball, among other things); yes, this can actually be confirmed by asking the college officials themselves. I know of it because my sister attended college there both before and after the college had a football team.)

    Especially at private, small schools, such conditions on donations are NOT entirely unusual. For that matter, our own government in the US puts conditions on funding all the time (there's a standing rule that all funds to international health organisations like WHO and UN health programs cannot be put to use for abortion or family planning programs, among other things)...in the case of universities, a big one is that they cannot discriminate on the basis of sex, religion, race, etc. if they are to get federal funding (yes, this includes Stafford loans and Pell grants, among other things). Why is it so unlikely that private donors can put strings in such as "Funding will continue as long as there are no fraternal organisations on campus"?

    (Don't even get me started on corporate sponsorships--my uni will probably end up having Papa John's as the only food outlet on campus, thanks to them paying for a multi-million-dollar football stadium. Many, if not most, big unis now are Coke-only or Pepsi-only establishments (hell, for all I know, small unis in rural Kentucky and Tennessee might go to being RC-only establishments :). If a donor is going to dump a large enough sum of money in a university's lap, they WILL whore themselves--this also goes for public and even private schools now [don't think you're going to get out of Coke-only schools by going Catholic or private--some of THESE are getting corporate sponsorship, too, and if you do NOT want a school that forces religious views down yer kid's throats you are quite literally SOL in large parts of the country--out of over 100 private schools in the Louisville metro area, all of four are non-denominational, one of these is a traditional school, and the other three are specialty schools for persons with various physical or mental handicaps such as the Deaf-Oral school or schools for kids with "emotional disorders"--also, keep in mind that private schools can literally reject a kid for ANY reason--the biggest reason they have "better" schools is they can literally cherrypick students).

  • it's standard business practice to keep your product center stage in any corporate event you sponsor. Trying to twist this into some big evil plot to control the world is just wrong, and makes you look stupid in the process.

    AC,

    On the one side, you've got student-critical functionality.

    On the other, you've got a direct threat against a source of funding.

    Intel demanded that Harvard disable student-critical functionality in return for cash. That they demanded any institution pimp out its reason for being on the basis of a cash grant is evil; that they did this to Harvard was the height of idiocy.

    I keep on bringing it up(cue broken record), but it's reminiscent of Microsoft revoking Compaq's right to sell Windows, or forcing IBM to buy Win95 off the street: To attack anyone else liket this, it's evil marketing practices. To attack major multinationals such as Compaq or IBM like that, it's just stupid.

    You're absolutely right, AC--they thought of themselves as keeping their product center stage. The problem was they forget both where they were(an educational institution with a primary purpose distinctly different from selling stuff, i.e. a trade show) and, even worse, exactly where they were. Screwing with Academia is one thing, screwing with Harvard is far stupider.

    They'll learn.

    Yours Truly,

    Dan Kaminsky
    DoxPara Research
    http://www.doxpara.com

  • Re:Coke / Pepsi, too! (Score:3)

    by gilroy ( 155262 ) on Monday June 12, 2000 @04:58AM (#1009465) Homepage Journal
    A few people have written that this sounds too goofy to be true. Alas, there is no such thing as "too goofy to be true"...

    Quick summary: In 1998 March, a kid at a school wore a Pepsi shirt on "Coke Day", when his school was trying to win some contest for most Coke-themed day or something. He was suspended for "disruption" and for ruining the picture they were trying to take. It's a pretty sorry story, actually.

    Here's list of links to stories on the affair:

    http://www.adbu sters.org/campaigns/commercialfree/toolbox/coke.ht ml [adbusters.org]
    http://www.corpwa tch.org/trac/corner/worldnews/other/other122.html [corpwatch.org]
    http://www.sjmercury.com/digita lhigh/news/coke98.htm [sjmercury.com]

  • Not only was I an exhibitor right next to the covered Macs in question, but 5 years ago I was a student using those same Mac terminals to check my email.

    The Macs in question were directly (2 feet) behind 3 exhibitors - for students to use the terminals they would have had to have been continuouslly tromping through the the exhibits. There were 20+ exhibits in all - Intel had one, and it happened to be the one in front of the email terminals (the iMacs) - they would have wanted them shut down no matter what brand they were. They were covered to keep students from walking up and booting them up (which they would still occasionally do anyway.)

    Finally, Harvard left a number of Mac terminals open at the edges of the exhibit hall, in plain view. It was only the terminals that sat in the middle of the exhibits that were turned off and covered.

    This whole thing smacks of a bunch of whiny Ivy league kids with nothing better to do. Remember Intel spent a _bundle_ funding that conference and the majority of exhibitors and participants were from non-profit organizations. Give the company some credit when it deserves it.
  • A lot of the same stuff (brand wars) is going on in junior high and high schools with Pepsi and Coke - Not just early advertising, but downright force of product in order to get donations.

    The interesting thing about that is that it seems to backfire. I'm at Penn State, a thoroughly Pepsi university (by contract), and just about everyone I know gets so sick of Pepsi that when they leave campus, they get Cokes. Now my high school is considering a soda contract, and I can't help but wonder if the same thing will happen there.

    Of course, it wouldn't work the same way with computers. This move seems a little paranoid of Intel.

  • Re:What about Harvard's response? (Score:3)

    by Spasemunki ( 63473 ) on Monday June 12, 2000 @02:58AM (#1009472) Homepage
    Well, one reason that FASCS submitted to Intel's requests is that FASCS is not the might of Harvard University. They didn't ask on-the-way-out-the-door president Neal Rudenstein if they could cover the iMacs, they asked the guys who man the help desk in the science center. Is it worth your job to tweak the nose of the worlds largest chip maker while you're on the job? I would have probably done the same thing, in their shoes. I'm pleased that HASCS put up the fight it did. I do have one question: What the hell did they do with the two labs full of Alphas and Macs in the basement? They're clearly visable from the main level if you take the trouble to look down. Did they black the windows out, or just firebomb the whole lower floor? I mean, god forbid someone catch sight of someone checking their E-mail on a Unix box. . .

  • Re:No free lunch (Score:5)

    by YASD ( 199639 ) on Monday June 12, 2000 @03:00AM (#1009476)

    ...they had every right to ask for iMacs to be covered.

    Of course they did. They also had every right to ask the entire Harvard faculty to drop and give them twenty. Microsoft has every right to ask for our firstborn children in their next EULA. I have every right to ask you to kiss my bum.

    The point is, Harvard should not have knuckled under and handed Intel whatever they asked for on an iridium platter. I think we should expect a little more backbone from one of our most prestigious educational institutions. It's not Intel who deserves the most criticism here.

    (Come to think of it, whose fault is it really, that Microsoft gets away with those EULAs?)

    ------

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