What I mean is that Cisco makes things with no regards to compatibility. Sure, they could use best practices, but they think they're too big to have to worry about that.

Technically, learning anything in school is hacking in the sense that you're figuring out something new (to you). Hacking is a bit of a misnomer. The implication that it is akin to cracking, though, is worrying; the campus is supposed to offer up services to all the students, not just certain students who have an officially sanctioned computer.

It's unreasonable to expect them to support just any machine, but on the other hand Cisco has a bad history of doing things like releasing products which require ancient and insecure Java, not working at all with Macs for years, claiming to be standards compliant when they're not, having "features" which are contradictory to expected behavior which you can't disable and so on.

I give the Cisco people shit every year at Interop - it's very cathartic! They've actually helped me deal with a number issues, partly because I'm funny and not actually angry towards individuals. They even invite me to their parties