Microsoft's University Challenge

THE FORCES of Vole, which have bought enlightenment to all, are having difficulty bringing their latest big thing to students across the world. According to the Washington Post, university network managers across the US are stroking their beards and contemplating the possibility of blocking students from downloading the latest upgrade to the Windows OS, SP2.

Not only are the universities concerned about the prospect of hundreds of students all trying to download the 250Mb blockbuster from Vole and hammering the network like an expresso filled black-smith they are worried that some of the university applications might crash.

Amongst those who have opted to block the software include George Mason University in Fairfax who have discovered that the update interferes with software that the university uses to run faculty PCs.

Catholic University in Washington DC and the University of Richmond has decided to block downloads of SP2 until they can test it properly. University of Notre Dame, where students are just starting has decided to block SP2 until the students are settled in and the network is a little less jumpy.

Other universities are blocking SP2 and are deploying their own version through internal services, to save on bandwidth.

However there have been some criticisms of the way the Vole has deal with the distribution of SP2. It has agreed to give schools one service pack disk for every 50 students on campus, with extra disks costing 32 cents each. However it has refused to allow the Universities to give each student a copy on CD-Rom without shelling out for extra licences.

The excuse is that if you give the disk to students an enterprising hacker might compromise the disk and unleash some viral nastiness.

We are not sure how this could be any different from them being able to comprise a server where the SP2 hard-drive is sitting, but we are sure Vole knows what it is talking about.