The incredible generosity of Microsoft

Today we received the following email

Congratulations to Yose Widjaja on winning the inaugural Microsoft 1st
Place Performance Award and Alexander Kuptsov on winning the 2nd Place
Performance Award.  Yose receives Windows Vista Ultimate and the
Wireless Laser Desktop 6000 valued at RRP $968 and Alexander receives
a copy of Office Ultimate RRP $868.

Thank you to the Microsoft Australia (www.microsoft.com.au) for
providing these new awards!

The Microsoft Performance Awards will be annually awarded to the first
and second place winners of the CSE 3rd year Performance Awards.

The awards will be presented at the annual CSE Prizes Reception on
Friday April 20th.

Of course, well done to the students on their performance. But their prizes seem a little shallow, considering that the first prize winner could legally obtain Windows Vista Business Edition via the CSE MSDN Academic program completely free of charge, and Microsoft themselves are selling Office Ultimate to students for $75 on their itsnotcheating.com.au website.

I am glad to also be announcing the inaugural Open Source prize, which consists of a Debian install CD and a copy of Open Office. Prizes can be collected from me at any time!

Update: Luckily I was informed that this blog post was eligible for the Microsoft "Golden Blog" award, because it mentions the word "Office" and links to the get-office-cheap website. Here's hoping I can also win a copy of Vista ULTIMATE!