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Do you really expected university IT to provide comparable solutions? Even the biggest university IT department is providing the stuff to maybe 50k people, and

Do you really expected university IT to provide comparable solutions? Even the biggest university IT department is providing the stuff to maybe 50k people, and as long as it more-or-less gets the job done, they keep their jobs and don't really care that it's not spectacular. Dropbox is providing the service to 5M people, and the whole business is built on it being spectacular. The economies of scale mean that they can afford to make tiny improvements, and they have serious incentives to make it as great as possible; otherwise, they go out of business. (In fact, otherwise, they would have gone out of business long before they made it to 5M users.) Good OSS can fix this to an extent--if someone started a really good host-your-own Dropbox project, every university could use it, getting you similar scale when it comes to coding it, so people would contribute from all over to make it great, and the IT at each individual university would just have to deploy it and update it as it improves.

soult 16y ago
I'm sorry that you go to such a crappy university then. Where I study, IT staff try to be use- and helpful, and not just to keep their jobs.
- jackowayed 16y ago
  I'm just saying that to make something as seamless and all-around good as Dropbox takes some serious work. Not only do IT people have little incentive to reach that level of perfection, they often aren't really coders and wouldn't be able to get a budget through that gave them enough man-hours to have time to make something like Dropbox. It's not worth it to the university, in general, to pay the full development cost of an extremely well-done implementation of a complex, nonessential system. The economies of scale aren't there. And I'm still a few months away from college. It looks like Stanford has some pretty good systems overall, but just as a datapoint, the design of Axess (the system that appears to handle pretty much everything--course signup, financial aid, etc) is much uglier (and a little harder to use) than any commercial site I use. It gets the job done, it probably dates back to when all sites looked like that, and the people in charge of it don't have enough incentive to give it a facelift.
  - ugh 16y ago
    My university has kick ass WiFi (Damn you WiFi and the constant distraction you provide!), you can use a VPN client to get access to, e.g., free papers anywhere in the world, the mail account is a bit low on space but works like a charm and you never have to fool around with writing anything on dead tree at some fixed location in space because you can do pretty much everything online. And the IT department tries really hard to make it possible for you to access all that stuff no matter which software or hardware you are using (that’s in contrast to what might be the case in some corporate environments). I can’t complain but it’s probably also true that something like powerful tools for seamless online collaboration is outside the scope of university IT departments. (The university actually uses moodle which would offer some useful functionality but not even the lecturers like it. Asked whether we should use moodle to upload our stuff: disgusted-look “Uhm, it would be nice if we could use Dropbox, that’s a pretty cool service. Do you know it?” :)
    - viraptor 16y ago
      Ah the joy of Moodle... I haven't met one person who likes it (although I've seen much worse systems - WebCT anyone?) It's amazing that people still want to install it for anything serious. Although maybe there no alternatives feature-wise?
  - johnswamps 16y ago
    Pretty much all the software that Stanford uses is complete crap. They can't even let alumni keep their e-mail addresses because of technical difficulties. The only thing that doesn't completely suck is courseware (http://courseware.stanford.edu/ http://courseware.stanford.edu/) and that was developed by the CS department, and as far as I know is only used for CS classes.

soult 16y ago

I'm sorry that you go to such a crappy university then. Where I study, IT staff try to be use- and helpful, and not just to keep their jobs.

jackowayed 16y ago
I'm just saying that to make something as seamless and all-around good as Dropbox takes some serious work. Not only do IT people have little incentive to reach that level of perfection, they often aren't really coders and wouldn't be able to get a budget through that gave them enough man-hours to have time to make something like Dropbox. It's not worth it to the university, in general, to pay the full development cost of an extremely well-done implementation of a complex, nonessential system. The economies of scale aren't there. And I'm still a few months away from college. It looks like Stanford has some pretty good systems overall, but just as a datapoint, the design of Axess (the system that appears to handle pretty much everything--course signup, financial aid, etc) is much uglier (and a little harder to use) than any commercial site I use. It gets the job done, it probably dates back to when all sites looked like that, and the people in charge of it don't have enough incentive to give it a facelift.
- ugh 16y ago
  My university has kick ass WiFi (Damn you WiFi and the constant distraction you provide!), you can use a VPN client to get access to, e.g., free papers anywhere in the world, the mail account is a bit low on space but works like a charm and you never have to fool around with writing anything on dead tree at some fixed location in space because you can do pretty much everything online. And the IT department tries really hard to make it possible for you to access all that stuff no matter which software or hardware you are using (that’s in contrast to what might be the case in some corporate environments). I can’t complain but it’s probably also true that something like powerful tools for seamless online collaboration is outside the scope of university IT departments. (The university actually uses moodle which would offer some useful functionality but not even the lecturers like it. Asked whether we should use moodle to upload our stuff: disgusted-look “Uhm, it would be nice if we could use Dropbox, that’s a pretty cool service. Do you know it?” :)
  - viraptor 16y ago
    Ah the joy of Moodle... I haven't met one person who likes it (although I've seen much worse systems - WebCT anyone?) It's amazing that people still want to install it for anything serious. Although maybe there no alternatives feature-wise?
- johnswamps 16y ago
  Pretty much all the software that Stanford uses is complete crap. They can't even let alumni keep their e-mail addresses because of technical difficulties. The only thing that doesn't completely suck is courseware (http://courseware.stanford.edu/ http://courseware.stanford.edu/) and that was developed by the CS department, and as far as I know is only used for CS classes.