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Comments: 207 +- Vista Failing "Blackboard" College Courses on Saturday March 31 2007, @03:32AM
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writertype writes "Although Blackboard is used to communicate between students and professors at virtually all of PC Magazine/Princeton Review's top 20 wired colleges, when run under a Vista environment users can see glitches. Moreover, IT departments told PC Mag that if Blackboard is used with Vista plus IE7, students can't communicate via the software. When asked why, Microsoft ... waffled. Blackboard says they'll have a fix in place by summer. Meanwhile, are there any other common college apps that Vista fails to work with?"
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It was really late for me.. (Score:2, Funny)
Re:It was really late for me.. (Score:5, Interesting)
It's really a mess in educational software land. About 2/3rds of the web based edu apps we support on campus work in one browser, and one browser only. Sometimes it's Firefox, sometimes it's IE. Some apps are even pegged to a specific version for no apparent reason. We have to fake different UA strings in different labs just to get this stuff to run.
Don't get me started with the Adobe DRM crap that every edu app has fallen in love with. It's really easy on the users when they need to use two different browsers to get to different parts of the same frickin' website. Ugh.
Parent
Re:It was really late for me.. (Score:5, Informative)
Wouldn't it be easier just to have a web proxy rewrite the UA string? I'm 95% sure squid can do that.
Back on the topic of educational software though... ughh. I worked in a school for just one year and it was enough to convince me that the way to sell software to schools is to send every school in the country a flyer proclaiming yourself to be "specialists in the education market" - that way you could make a bunch of sales without having to actually produce a half-decent product.
I was later told that there's a reason for this. Educational software - certainly in the UK - is generally split into two camps.
On the one hand, you've got stuff written by computer people. It's generally reasonably easy to manage, can be rolled out across a network and is not too much hassle. But it's also generally lousy at getting a point across, so it's not very popular with teachers. Bit of a problem when ultimately it's the teachers who are going to work with it.
On the other hand, you've got programs written by teachers who happen to have an interest in computing. It's generally quite good at getting a point across (and is thus popular with teachers) but it was usually written by someone who's never had to think beyond the PC on their desk. So the installation instructions say "Go to every PC, insert the CD and type D:\setup". In extreme cases, you find all sorts of annoyances: like parts of the setup program have been hardcoded to assume it's being installed from CD and the CD-ROM drive is drive D. Calling the software manufacturer and pointing out that this isn't terribly practical when the software is to be installed on a few hundred workstations generally results in an answer of "Oh. Never thought of that. Never mind, it only takes 5 minutes to install."
Multiplying that 5 minutes by the number of PCs which need the software installed is left as an exercise for the reader.
In the interests of fairness, I should point out that this was a few years ago - before XP was released and MSIs became as common as they are today. But I would be astonished if you were to tell me that things have changed that drastically.
Parent
Re:It was really late for me.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Many schools still rely on Windows 98 machines for some programs, especially primary schools, as the software will only run on old versions of Windows. Some schools still make use of Acorn Archimedes computers because the software was that good. New computers are expensive, and schools in the UK simply do not have the budget to spend on luxuries such as Vista or XP. Schools, certainly in my county, do not get the advantages of Microsoft discounts because the educational authority appears to be sleeping with computer giants such as RM Nimbus or Viglen. The school is only allowed to buy its computers through these suppliers, and do not get a very good deal. The same companies also provide (well, resell I guess) broadband internet access - at an extortionate rate.
There is a third case with software - some software is written by ex-teachers that are very good programmers. Sherston software (http://www.sherston.com/) is one example of quality educational software that does things this way.
Parent
Re:It was really late for me.. (Score:4, Interesting)
It insisted on Adobe Reader 7.0. Not Adobe Professional 7.0 which I had installed, not Adobe Reader 8, which Adobe had on their website, not Adobe 6 Reader on my laptop.
I hope sealed[media] gets eaten by a grue.
Parent
What's Microsoft got to do with it? (Score:5, Insightful)
They shouldn't have waffled. They should have given the answer this deserves...how the hell is this Microsoft's problem to correct?
Vista was in beta forever and a day. Beta 3 was out and the API was locked down for at least several months before RTM. In cases where any third party software does not now work under Vista, it is *entirely* the fault of that software company. Holding Microsoft responsible to any degree here is just plain stupid.
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Re:What's Microsoft got to do with it? (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:What's Microsoft got to do with it? (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
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How do you know it's for no good reason? If you've seen the source code, then perhaps you might enlighten us.
In any case, who cares? nVidia does it, and does it very promptly when required. Which is more than we can say for the majority of hardware producers, who as a rule are content to leave Linux/Solaris/FreeBSD users completely unsupported.
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Re:What's Microsoft got to do with it? (Score:4, Insightful)
I mostly blame schools though. They are the ones who let the vista in without going through enough testing, Like they haven't experienced exactly the same with previous windows releases.
Parent
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Guess what, Blackboard... there are standards (and QA teams) for a reason!
Re:What's Microsoft got to do with it? (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re:What's Microsoft got to do with it? (Score:5, Interesting)
* Learning Management System (LMS) software partially owned by Microsoft
http://www.humboldt.edu/~jdv1/moodle/all.htm [humboldt.edu]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assets_owned
Parent
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Law school exam software is a prime example. George Washington refuses to release the OS X version of the software (even though it exists), because their IT department has chosen to go all-Microsoft. All students are required to have a Windows notebook, and the IT
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It is Microsoft's fault if Vista broke existing applications without a very good reason for doing so.
No, it's Microsoft's fault if the application was written to documented APIs and following their recommended practices.
Given that 99% of software problems in Windows are caused by applications that *don't* do this (Exhibit A: any application released in the last ~8 years or so that needlessly requires Administrator privileges), this is probably something Microsoft deserve the benefit of the doubt on.
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I don't think we can tell from this article whose fault this is. If Microsoft really did lock down their changes several months ago and documented them properly, it is Blackboard's fault not to have adapted. On the other hand, if Microsoft has kept changing things, has failed to document the API properly, or has failed to see to it that their code actually conforms to the documentation, it is Microsoft's fault.
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Oh, shudder, you evil person you. How dare you suggest that Microsoft would do something like THAT?
It wouldn't be the first time.
Not so simple (Score:5, Informative)
Over the years I've noticed a trend: If you use Microsoft development tools, you end up having problems with backwards compatibility. Either their compilers so a lot of weird things or MS makes sure to break them so even the programmers have to upgrade.
Parent
Re:Not so simple (Score:5, Interesting)
I recently came across an old CDR with a bunch of games. Most of them seemed to work, whether coded for DOS, Win 3.1 or 95. Except the old Microsoft games. They crashed hard when I tried to run them in current versions of Windows. I assume becasue MS used undocumented hooks to optimise for the then current Windows.
Parent
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But this would undermine the planned-obsolescence/forced-upgrade strategy, which -- if you hadn't noticed -- is a more important piece of their business than "create better tools".
Webapps? (Score:2)
Without really knowing the answers to all of these, I don't have an opinion on whether this is Microsoft's fault or the app-buil
Re:What's Microsoft got to do with it? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm sorry, but after experiencing Blackboard in grad school, I would tend shift my suspicion to the incompetent developers and designers behind Blackboard, not the incompetent developers and designers behind Windows.
Parent
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Everyone else shouldn't be doing Microsoft's job for them - making it work.
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Especially not when they SELL access to the information so that you can keep your software current, in the form of MSDN subscriptions (which are not cheap, btw).
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Sure. You can get free versions of the SDK. Usually a few months AFTER the OS/Program or whatever is released. If you pay, however, you get in early. My point stands.
It's a feature. (Score:5, Funny)
MySpace is next.
It's lack of responsibility... (Score:3, Insightful)
I've worked with and had to support Blackboard before. There are few applications that I think are worse. (I recall a bug that we experienced, where if two people submitted an assessment at the same time, or very close to the same time, the software would lose one of them.)
Also, as crappy as Vista is, it was in beta and development for a long time. At the very least, Blackboard should have issued an advisory stating that under certain c
*shrug* (Score:5, Insightful)
Doesn't affect me anyway, as any school of comp sci should be, all our labs are thin x-servers.
The rest of the uni can suffer in Novell hell for all I care, stupid ITS.
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My username was/is bfabry, or "FABRY,BEAUJONATHAN" as blackboard likes to call me for some reason.
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The icing on the cake... (Score:5, Funny)
"WebCT Vista is not supported on the Windows Vista platform."
*facepalm*
Internet Explorer 7 (Score:5, Informative)
Ahh.. those students... (Score:5, Funny)
Yes, there are some problems with uTorrent [nivmedia.com]
University of Arizona's Wireless APs (Score:2, Interesting)
http://forum.oscr.arizona.edu/showthread.php?t=292 5&page=2 [arizona.edu] - one of a few threads in the Office of Student Computing Resources forums following broken wifi and vista
As of right now, Vista users wanting to surf encrypted have to google and find a copy of the Vista-compatible Cisco VPN Client 5.0 beta (the UA's sitelicense website still only has VPN Client 4.9, which is no
So much for Data Analysis (Score:5, Informative)
SPSS [e-academy.com], SAS [sas.com], MATLAB and SAP [mit.edu] and ESRI ArcGIS [esri.com]
Eh, this is no big deal, right? I mean, who really wants to know about facts and numbers? Especially when you are using a *computer*.
Blackboard doesn't work on Vista? (Score:3, Funny)
sloppy coding? (Score:5, Insightful)
rephrase the question correctly... (Score:2)
Vista == WinME (Score:3, Interesting)
The big question is when Vista will be declared a flop?
Blackboard (Score:3, Informative)
That being said, why the hell does a web application break with an Operating System update? Is Microsoft at fault here? Did they mock around with how POST/GET variables get sent to the server or how the browser accepts server responses? Are cookies randomly getting erased from IE? CSS/HTML glitches in the new IE rendering the pages useless? Or is this Blackboard's own code depending on some obscure ActiveX/IE functionality that is no longer there in Vista and thus violating the #1 reason why web applications are so useful? - They are supposed to work everywhere, no matter what OS we use! I'm thinking it's the latter.
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