This is part three in a four-part series about the College of IST. Part 1, Part 2.

You know that IST students are more crafty when it comes to file sharing, but you don’t have to walk on the dark side to get your hands on some free intellectual property.

That means you don’t have to search the seedy areas of the Internet for Microsoft software. Through a partnership with the Microsoft Developer Network called MSDN Academic Alliance, you can get free software and operating systems, at no cost at all. If you’re in the dorms, it does not count against your 4GB weekly limit. If you’re looking to dual-boot XP and Leopard on a MacBook or virtualize XP in Linux under VirtualBox, you can get up to three free copies of XP Pro (at the time of this writing). The College of IST is part of the MSDN AA and since Microsoft is trying to get its software in the hands of IT’s brightest young minds, you’re automatically given access as a student.

A great way to pick up, learn more, or master nearly any language is through the O’Reilly Media’s gamut of comprehensive books. They famously include some interesting pictures on the covers, which has given Programming Perl the nickname of “The Camel Book”. For a student, the textbooks’ high costs are prohibitively expensive—as much as $60 or $70 at the Bookstore. However, you can peruse the entire catalog of O’Reilly books online, for free, at Safari Books Online (in homage to the menagerie of animal covers). There are literally thousands of books on quite possibly every IT subject out there. It’s all free provided you connect from a PSU-networked computer, which you can VPN to if you’re off campus.

From the College of IST you can get a plethora of free services at the 3C Classrooms. The site could use some work but you still get the same stuff: MS SQL or MySQL access, an IST computer you can remote desktop to, and PHP, ASP, and ColdFusion for your 200MB of webspace. If you’re cobbling together a web app, you could do reasonably well with the free services from IST.

If open-source software is more your flavor, do not miss PSU’s open-source mirror. It’s all free (thank you open source), fast, and does not count against your bandwidth in the dorms. Linux and BSD distros, GNU software, TeX typesetting engines, it’s all here. There are terabytes of awesome FOSS for any serious IST student.

Don’t forget that the ITS student labs at Penn State have an amazing array of professional (and very expensive software) for Windows and OS X. Adobe CS3, AutoCAD, Matlab, Dreamweaver, and many more are available 24/7 at all computer labs. Be sure to take advantage of the legally licensed software. It can also help your chances to learn and use software for coursework that would otherwise be too expensive, especially to build your resume.

Finally, as a college student you can get discounts from the Apple Store and Dell. And if you’d rather not shell out $230 at the bookstore for Microsoft Office 2007 Ultimate, use your student email to snag a completely legal download for $60 at http://www.theultimatesteal.com.

Categories: Opinion