Comment Re:Try Carnegie Mellon! (Score 2, Interesting) 201
As a non-CS Carnegie Mellon student, I must sadly report that the situation isn't like this at all in other departments. I was preparing a ./ post myself a couple of days back, but waw reluctant to post it because if was too bitter to CMU.
The situation goes like this: (Heinz School of Business & Public Policy)
We were required to have a laptop. At the same time, anyone not purchasing the "official" CMU laptop (IBM Thinkpad T23 with Windows XP and 15GB more of crappy software, all notoriously misconfigured) was penalized with a "support premium" of $750. So we aaaall had to have this nice XP-based system, full of M$ products (.NET studio, full Office suite etc). Why, I ask?
Further, since I deleted everything and installed GNU/Linux on the laptop, I've noticed a couple of "incompatibilities" with the university. If I want to change my departmental password, I have to go to the help desk and ask them to do it for me, because the only electronic way of doing it, is a windows utility! (I'm not talking about the campus-wide password here, just the Heinz password).
Or take the other day, we were having a student rep election. Votes were submitted to a (non-encrypted...) website, that did not work with Mozilla or Konqueror. It just would not register my vote, returning an error message. When I told the department about that, they said other (IE) users did not have any problems.
On any other occasion that I've asked for help (mostly to do with encrypting my communication with the university servers), I've received a bunch of "well, we don't really support your platform" replies.
I'm really frustrated at the M$-exclusive policy of my department, especially taking into account CMU's reputation and the conditions that you reported for the CS department!
The incident with the Word file you mentioned happened to me, in precicely the reverse way. I submitted an assignment as .pdf, only to be told off and asked (in all capitals) PLEASE, FROM NEXT TIME, USE MS-WORD TO DO THE HOMEWORK.
How does one deal with an attitude like that?
The situation goes like this: (Heinz School of Business & Public Policy)
We were required to have a laptop. At the same time, anyone not purchasing the "official" CMU laptop (IBM Thinkpad T23 with Windows XP and 15GB more of crappy software, all notoriously misconfigured) was penalized with a "support premium" of $750. So we aaaall had to have this nice XP-based system, full of M$ products (.NET studio, full Office suite etc). Why, I ask?
Further, since I deleted everything and installed GNU/Linux on the laptop, I've noticed a couple of "incompatibilities" with the university. If I want to change my departmental password, I have to go to the help desk and ask them to do it for me, because the only electronic way of doing it, is a windows utility! (I'm not talking about the campus-wide password here, just the Heinz password).
Or take the other day, we were having a student rep election. Votes were submitted to a (non-encrypted...) website, that did not work with Mozilla or Konqueror. It just would not register my vote, returning an error message. When I told the department about that, they said other (IE) users did not have any problems.
On any other occasion that I've asked for help (mostly to do with encrypting my communication with the university servers), I've received a bunch of "well, we don't really support your platform" replies.
I'm really frustrated at the M$-exclusive policy of my department, especially taking into account CMU's reputation and the conditions that you reported for the CS department!
The incident with the Word file you mentioned happened to me, in precicely the reverse way. I submitted an assignment as
How does one deal with an attitude like that?
