Stop Microsoft
All Things Microsoft => Microsoft as a Company => Topic started by: Oni Link on 19 February 2002, 16:14
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I cannot believe what I am seeing at schools these days. Everything is M$!
They brainwash the teachers who pass it on to the students who pass it on to their friends...... and so on.
We asked our IT teacher "why do we use M$ software and why do you enforce the use of M$?"
His reply was "Because they are 'CHEAPER', 'BETTER' software, more 'RELIABLE' and because M$ has a huge deal going with the State Governemnts.
He 'properly' believes that M$ is superior. They must have got to him! hehehehehe
They will never succumb unless this is stopped and people are informed earlier about OS's such as Linux.
Anyway I just wanted to know if any of you fellow students have the same problem.
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When i was at school (mid nineties) my high school was in the final stages of upgrading its network from a bunch of BBC BASICs (a machine running M$ BASIC, similar to the BBC ELECTRON) to an Appleshare network of Macs and Laserwriters. Both sets of machines could use the same network, but of course not all machines could run all the programs, et c. At the time they had maybe just over a hundred Macs of various models, a few SEs and some LEs and PPCs possibly, in 3 different labs, and in departments all round the school.
When i left for college, of course they had M$ windows 95 with M$ works et c. Slow and boring by comparison, and after our Computing Department had told us that Apple was the future of computing, i wondered a little at the general "spit and sellotape" system the college had in their labs (only 2 labs, despite having about twice the number of students than at my high school).
Well, my sister tells me that the high school still has a Mac based network. I reckon they may have up to a dozen PCs, and you can bet all of those PCs will run Windows, but they retain a healthy relationship with Mac in their teaching and their networking.
It makes me wonder what's wrong with the rest of the world!
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Yeah when I went to Primary school, Macs were definately dominate.
Where you are from, people must be more "free thinking" cause here in Australia people are very gulable and are easily influenced.
Its nice to hear that some parts of the world are still hanging on.
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it's much the same here as in Australia, i found actually that people in Australia were just a little bit more liberal in their thoughts about some things, (but definitely not in others! read: Howard's reelection, the boat people shambles, not wanting to offend you of course!)maybe it's just the people i hung out with when i was there...
BTW, which part of Australia are you from?
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The university that I attend just took a big step backwards. When I took CSE 231 (the introductory programming course) last semester we did everything in a Unix lab. But I guess this semester they switched everything over to a Window's lab and are using some Microsoft based program to write their code. And they call this an institution for "higher learning"?
-Gonusto
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Totaly unrelated but Gonusto is properly spelld Gnusto.
Pronounced Gu-nusto.
Just though you would like to know, dont want your Thaumaturgy going awry and resurecting Jeer or anything (http://smile.gif)
And in a related note to the thred. WIndows sux ass, and M$ is probably offering deals to schools to undercut comopetition.
They are assholes.
TTFN
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Woa psyjax . . . that was completely over my head. My member name was completely of my own devising. Any similarities it has to anything else real or fictional are completely coincidental. "Gonusto" was just me switching around the letters of a character's name in the book I'm writing. I had no idea that it (or some variation of it) had ever been used before. The information you presented me with does sound interesting though. Maybe you could tell me a bit more about what you meant by "Thaumaturgy" and "resurecting Jeer" . . . ?
Back to the thread though . . . I'm pretty sure that Microsoft has struck a deal with the University. Although, from what I hear all subsequent courses still use Unix labs. Its just that first one that's been switched over to Microsoft . . . for now at least. Maybe I should talk to my professor and find out just what exactly is going on.
-Gonusto
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LOL... nevermind (http://smile.gif)
hmmm... actually. I will give a prize to anyone on this site if they can tell me were this refrence comes from!
ok ok.. maybe not a prize, but at least I will say Huzza! good for you.
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Uh, Star Wars?
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My guess is something having to do with Anime or some related manga . . . but beyond that, I have not a clue.
-Gonusto
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Hey Calum
I live on the boarder of Queensland and New South Wales (the Gold Coast)
Where did you stay when you were here?
[ February 19, 2002: Message edited by: Oni Link ]
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Nope both wrong. Gnusto is related to something far far geekyer than Starwars or Anime. It is the spell for enscribing other spells into your spell book used in the classic Infocom Text-Adventure series : ENCHANTER.
If you havent herd of it, perhapse you have heard of Zork. These two stories ran parallel to each other and in the same world. Enchanters are a type of Magician that practices Thaumaturgy, and Jeer was an Evil Enchanter that you have to defeat In the first one (I think).
Anyaway, sorry for taking up web board space with this foolishness. Continue thine discussion.
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I don't remember that one, but I sure remember Zork and Zork II on the Commodore 64. Those were my favorites! And there was one based in the Egyptian desert with pyramids that I thought was pretty cool. I think it was called "Infadel" or "Infodel" something like that. Wonder if there is a copy of those games around? I might have to install the C64 emulator and try them out again....
[ February 19, 2002: Message edited by: VoidMain ]
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quote:
Originally posted by VoidMain:
I don't remember that one, but I sure remember Zork and Zork II on the Commodore 64. Those were my favorites! And there was one based in the Egyptian desert with pyramids that I thought was pretty cool. I think it was called "Infadel" or "Infodel" something like that. Wonder if there is a copy of those games around? I might have to install the C64 emulator and try them out again....
[ February 19, 2002: Message edited by: VoidMain ]
No you don't! Alot of them are available for free online. All you need is a Z-code interpreter. The best one for UNIX is frotz. Heck Im running the Darwin version (http://smile.gif)
http://www.ifarchive.org/ (http://www.ifarchive.org/)
That site has everything you need. There is a big underground comunity devoted to these games and writing new ones. One of the best one's I have played is a game calld Curses. It is free as well. I recomend anyone to check this stuff out, don't get hooked tho.
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quote:
Originally posted by VoidMain:
I don't remember that one, but I sure remember Zork and Zork II on the Commodore 64. Those were my favorites! And there was one based in the Egyptian desert with pyramids that I thought was pretty cool. I think it was called "Infadel" or "Infodel" something like that. Wonder if there is a copy of those games around? I might have to install the C64 emulator and try them out again....
[ February 19, 2002: Message edited by: VoidMain ]
No you don't! Alot of them are available for free online. All you need is a Z-code interpreter. The best one for UNIX is frotz. Heck Im running the Darwin version (http://smile.gif)
http://www.ifarchive.org/ (http://www.ifarchive.org/)
That site has everything you need. There is a big underground comunity devoted to these games and writing new ones. One of the best one's I have played is a game calld Curses. It is free as well. I recomend anyone to check this stuff out, don't get hooked tho.
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Ok, compiled frotz 2.41 and ran a sample zcode game on it. I didn't see Zork on the site you mentioned. Am I looking in the wrong place?
Actually, I just downloaded ZTUU which appears to be Zork but I don't know for sure if it is the original Zork 1.
[ February 20, 2002: Message edited by: VoidMain ]
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Zork UU is good. That is a game made by the origional Zork designers to promote Zork: Grand Inquisitor. The origional zork 1 is calld mini-zork. It's the whole game, I'm not quite sure why they call it mini.
EDIT: Scratch that, hmmm things have changed at IFArchive. Im gonna try and see if I can track down the zcode files.
[ February 20, 2002: Message edited by: psyjax ]
FINAL EDIT:
Ok! I traked down the origional Inform files for zork 1-3
http://www.csd.uwo.ca/~pete/Infocom/games.html (http://www.csd.uwo.ca/~pete/Infocom/games.html)
download the ZIP version and open the DATA folder. Then put the .DAT file werever you are keeping your zcode. At the propt frotz [gamename].DAT. That should do it! Have fun! Check the other stuff on the site to, he may have more files.
TRUELY FINAL EDIT:
http://www.douglasadams.com/creations/hhgg.z5 (http://www.douglasadams.com/creations/hhgg.z5)
the above is zcode for the Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy another supper awsome game, if you want it.
[ February 20, 2002: Message edited by: psyjax ]
[ February 20, 2002: Message edited by: psyjax ]
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Uhm well I don't play games but at my school we do Unix/Linux about 60% of the time....we do Micro$hit stuff and Networking the rest of the time.
This is a course in Computer Systems at college not High School....we did all our programming in high school on stacks of punch cards.....Fortran
How getto is that....hey it was the 80's. :eek:
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toptastic! i like to hear of institutions that don't use M$ blindly and dumbly!
Re: Australia, all up and down the East Coast, i stayed a few weeks in Mullumbimby and the general Byron area last August/September. Very good...
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I am a teacher at a secondary school (11-16 years) in England and our network is 100% Win98. From my experience MS is the preferred choice of OS for education. Some schools use NT, some use Win9x, but anything else is rare.
We used to have some Apple Macs, but they have been "retired" and replaced with PCs - "too expensive to buy Macs", "too difficult to nintegrate into our network". The SysAdmin is a 20 something who has no experience of anything except MS, and no inclination to learn anything else.
There was a tradition of using a whole range of machines and OSes because they would do the job best, but that has disappeared in the past 6 or 7 years. I have worked in schools that used BBCs, Acorn, Apple, Amiga and Atari's in different departments. No chance of networking them, but it wasn't necessary in the days before widespread internet access was available.
Art & Design used Amigas for graphics, Music used Atari ST with built in MIDI, Acorn was a big player in the educational software market. Now MS have come to dominate here as elsewhere. To many people there does not *appear* to be any alternative.
On a related note, I don't know what sort of deal MS offer schools, but I paid
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quote:
Originally posted by Druid:
On a related note, I don't know what sort of deal MS offer schools, but I paid
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Hmm.... this might seem odd but at my school Microsoft has no interest in giving students dirt cheap licences. We have routers and switches donated by Cisco and it pays off by having the next generation of Sys-Admins all knowing your OS, (IOS) etc.
Guess M$ doesn care to have the next generation of IT folks knowing their OS very well.
Despite this M$ is still big at school since the kids start early in M$ stuff.