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SETI@Home Install Leads To School Tech Supervisor's Resignation
An anonymous reader writes "Apparently the most prolific of users in the SETI@Home community has resigned his job as a school technology supervisor after it was revealed he had the software installed on some 5000 school machines. The school claims to have lost $1 million in upkeep on the affected machines."
40 watts x 24 hours x 365 days x 10 years x 5000 machines x $.06 /kwh = $1,051,200
The criminal part (that apparently wasn't in TFA) was the 18 school computers they found at his house that he'd taken home with him. This is a better source: http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/2009/11/30/20091130searchforaliens1202.html
It actually does use more power running the CPU full throttle vs idle. The rule of thumb I learned was a buck a watt per year. By which $200 sounds nuts. School PCs do not have 200W worth of CPU in them.
But..oh, over 10 years. That's $20/year/system. Very plausible.
This guy learned the following lesson the hard way: Systems you manage are not yours. They are your employers. The potentially mitigating factor here from TFA, is that he claims he had permission. If so, whoever granted permission should be fired. $1m is real money, especially if you're a school district.
http://www.eastvalleytribune.com/story/147847
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
The other article linked here really should be in the story: Higley firing tied to alien-search software. This one makes it pretty clear that the guy was fired because he's a bad employee and a lousy manager, not because he wants to find aliens.
Quite frankly, it's a little annoying that the OP's story only mentions "ET". That's irresponsible reporting, and it's why newspapers are folding all over the country; when your reporters can't even write a proper, coherent, unbiased story, people go elsewhere for their news.
Is it really likely that the computers weren't on anyway? If not, then surely someone would have noticed the fact that the computers were running all night for no reason sometime in the past 10 years...
Plug your computer into the wall through a power meter and you'll notice the difference between idle and heavy CPU use being easily over the 40 W the GP used.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
Well, that, and lying about removing the software when the problems caused by it came to light and he was ordered by previous administrators to remove it.
...and downloading pornography using school computers.
...and, on top of all that, generally not doing the job he was hired to do.
At least, that's what he is being accused of, according to this more complete article on the story.
SETI@Home is not the only issue here.
The article says the district hired "five experts" and reports on "one company" that did a district-wide technology audit.
It doesn't say "five companies". It also doesn't identify the problem the five experts were hired to address as being "why the PCs were running slow?" I suspect from the description of the problems (though its not clear which were uncovered when, and which motivated the action) that a variety of intermittent problems with systems and higher than anticipated maintenance and replacement costs, which their in-house tech staff couldn't adequately explain, are what the outside experts were brought in to explain, which goes beyond "why computers are running slow?" to "why are paying so much for tech and still having so many problems?".
Some of those computers date back to 2000 - sleep mode?
Also, as comments in this article point out, the techs were forbidden from rolling out a script that would have turned the computers off at night, as it was against school policy.
Read the comments - some are from people who worked there, some from people who live there. It looks more like the guy was fired because someone - Superintendent Denise Birdwell - wanted to polish her image.
Bullshit! You need a budget and you need authorization. Without both of those, you end up with a rats nest. Same as telephone systems from Ma Bell. Same as anywhere else.
OMG BLOCK PORT 80 (http) AND PORT 443 (https/ssl) NOW!
It wasn't until right before the school board elections that the board member pushed this. The hardware problems with the white boards have been covered elsewhere on slashdot - they're not unique to this school. Teachers complained about being given the hardware and no training beyond "Here's the install cd. Good luck."
The $2 million is for updating hardware and a new secure building - infrastructure improvements - NOT to "fix his unethical and incompetant (sic) behavior"