As a researcher, I write a lot of long documents. If you were really writing long documents and saving time were really what mattered to you, you would be using LaTeX. Seriously, LaTeX effectively automates
citations and bibliography
tables of contents (don't even try to say that Office does this. The feature exists but it does not work right.)
indexes
reformatting the document quickly (MLA to Chicago? change one line. Journal to Book? change one line. different font, but only for text and not headlines? change two lines)
If, on the other hand, all you do is write little five page or less memos or letters, Office is clearly superior to LaTeX. But then, you would really need to convince me that MS Office saves you any time whatsoever over OpenOffice or KOffice.
Unless, of course, your argument is that Office is faster because you know it already, which really is not valid for the rest of us.
But the ammunition will be different. When you see a truck, you hit it with High Explosive (HE) or heavy machine gun fire. If you see a tank, you hit it with Kinetic Energy (KE) or High Explosive Anti-Tank (HEAT) rounds.
There is good reason for this. If you hit a tank with something that just explodes and rains shrapnel, the hit will just bounce off, maybe destroying the optics but that is about it. You have to pierce the armor, which you do by hitting it with something very heavy and slender (such as a rod of depleted uranium) traveling at high speed that focuses a bunch of energy on one point. The heat from the collision and spalling from the armor itself then destroys whatever is behind the armor.
This does not work for a truck. If you hit it with a KE round, the round will just sail right through it. If there is nothing vital (the driver, engine, fuel lines, etc) where the KE round happens to pass, then the truck will just keep rolling. That is why you hit it with HE or MG fire. The many small bits of metal from an exploding HE round have a much higher chance of hitting something vital than the single big chunk from a KE round.
As far as a tank is concerned, you usually only get one or two shots at it before it or its buddies start returning fire. If you hit it with the wrong ammunition, he is going to kill you.
It should be noted that the inverse is also true. Making vehicles such as a truck look highly armored increases their survivability in certain situations because AT rounds are rarer than lighter ammunition and an infantry squad with a machine gun is not going attack a tank.
A better solution than taking money, banning their product for a set time.
No, that would be punishing EU member states at least as much Intel. Have you looked at the market for servers lately? Desktops? Laptops? Intel is subject to anti-competition laws because it has a dominant market position. If you were to suddenly cut their products out of the market, that would hurt every manufacturer of IT equipment and every business that uses said equipment. That is a great way to hurt the EU's ability to perform in the world market.
The reason a fine is useful is precisely because the costs are passed on to Intel customers worldwide, not just in the EU. This means that it really is Intel that is paying for its behavior on a global scale.
No. At the very least, this gives schools a bargaining chip when negotiating journal packages with Elsevier.
Also, anything that brings the sickening relationship between doctors and pharmaceutical companies to light is a good thing. Many times, doctors will prescribe the latest (expensive) drug to a patient when a generic does the job just as well precisely because the pharmaceutical companies bombard them with this kind of semi-false information. People need to be aware of this.
It is from HL Mencken, The American Mercury, April, 1924. The sentiment goes back at least to JJ Rouseau.
Here is a great quote from the article:
Building a case for dismissal is so time-consuming, costly and draining for principals and administrators that many say they don't make the effort except in the most egregious cases. The vast majority of firings stem from blatant misconduct, including sexual abuse, other immoral or illegal behavior, insubordination or repeated violation of rules such as showing up on time.
Either the journalist is a product of the LA school system or the LA school system mandates that teachers show up late.
More to the point, however, is that this is actually not such a bad system, no matter what populist journalists wishing to stir up anti-(government|teacher's union) sentiment says. As somebody with managerial experience in the federal government, I can attest that establishing a pattern of misconduct is a very effective way to get people fired. However, it requires that administrators keep their paperwork in order. There has to be a written record in place establishing that the misconduct actually happened. This requirement is a good thing in government positions because it keeps people from getting fired for political reasons and thus helps prevent nepotism and cronyism. The horror stories that you hear about the impossibility of firing bad employees always come from inept administrators who could not be bothered to properly manage their personnel and want to blame the system for their failings.
That depends who you ask. The functionalists would say yes, the realists would say no and the constructivists would say sort of. Theorists of multi-level governance would say that the whole concept of a sovereign state is over and done with but most of us have yet to realise it.
Also, it is true that fines are a significant portion of the EU's small budget.
Governments need someone to pay for the huge debt they're accumulating. Hey Intel, these guys, they have money. We can take it and spend it on programs that will make us look good, potentially reelected.
Sickening.
Please. It is a government. It can just print money if it wants to. As painful as the resulting inflation would be, that would be preferable to damaging the reputation of the rule of law on the continent.
I have been using Ubuntu since 5.04 and Mandrake since 9.1. Mandriva's implementation of KDE (3 and 4) is one of the best around. It is certainly better than Kubuntu. If you want an easy but reliable desktop Linux based on KDE, Mandriva is the way to go. Mandriva has better gtk integration, better update notification, and better a better configuration center than any other kde implementation that I have seen.
Also, Mandriva's fonts are the best I have seen in Linux. I don't know why everybody else does not do whatever it is that they do, but they are smooth as silk.
Have you ever tried to walk 72 miles in a day? Even back in my infantry days I would have called you nuts.
One mile every 20 minutes (one km every 12 min for most of you) is actually quite brisk, and pretty fatiguing over 2 or 3 hours, let alone 24. Factor in time to eat, drink, change socks, cover blisters, relieve your self, etc, and you are looking at having to run-walk to keep that kind of pace.
While actual athletes may be able to do more, I would put the absolute limit for a fit person at around 40 miles in 24 hours if the person must carry nothing, the weather is neither too hot nor too cold and the person is very motivated. A fit person could comfortably walk around 18 miles in a day, and 12 miles per day at a sustained rate.
For the overwhelming majority of humanity (with the possible exceptions of Kenyans...) 72 miles in a 24 hour period is simply not possible.
In the case at hand, the site is 27 kilometers (a little more than 18 miles) from the Vatican.
No, he is asking people to do what they have not done in the history of capitalism: ignore what something costs.
Value in this context is just synonym for cost-benefit analysis, which is a concept people are already quite familiar with even if they do not always apply it. The reason Microsoft wants OSS vendors to change their vocabulary is that they are aware that they have lost the cost-benefit fight under the old vocabulary and they want OSS marketeers to help them re-open the same debate under new terms.
The longer you can keep people redefining their premises, the longer you can hinder actual comparison and continue to market software with the good will that Jerry Seinfeld can sell you.
but even they do a better job than the other channels in at least having someone there to provide token opposition. Their bias is very evident because they provide the contrast right there.
I believe that you misspelled "strawman" a couple of times. Let me fix that:
Yhey do a better job than the other channels in at least having someone there to provide strawman opposition.Their bias is very evident because they provide the strawman right there.
I am all for punishing the bad guys and everything, but how would US authorities have jurisdiction over an attack that happened on Estonia from Russia? Can they prove that it crossed American networks?
While it does involve having thousands of addresses, this kind of thing is pretty easy to automate, given what your goals are. For example, I use this tool to determine which country my visitors are in and display the relevant contact information (show the French address to people in France, the Belgian one to people in Belgium, etc). I have a cron job set up to update the database once a week; it is fully automatic and very reliable.
If you need to be more specific, this guy has a php class that can supposedly give you information as specific as city, or you can write your own using the db you can download here, although I can't personally vouch for either. You could also parse the hostnames in your server and only allow service providers in your area.
Also, google code has a really good tutorial for a client side application if your server is limited in its capabilities.
Either way, it sounds from the summary like you have access to a database of ip address ranges you want to allow. Just set up a cron job to download it and parse it.
Not piracy
on
Why TV Lost
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Now yes, from a strict legal point of view, I've no doubt that still counts of piracy.
IANAL, but I believe that unless it happens on the high seas and involves forcefully robbing or commandeering a vessel, from a strict legal point of view it is not piracy.
As a former infantryman, I can tell you that you are really over thinking this. Rugged means more than just hard to break. It also means that it is a single piece (so he can't loose part of it) and that those pieces are easily replaceable.
Forget the charger, and get him something nice that runs on AAs. Lots of military equipment, such as the AN/PRC-14 night vision goggles or the little radios that squads carry around, run on AAs and so he is sure never to have a shortage. You literally have boxes of these things just floating around where ever you go. They aren't that heavy, they are virtually unbreakable, and he will have to carry some anyway. When I was in, guys bought electric shavers that ran on AAs expressly for this reason.
Besides, his unit will appreciate him not flipping a mirror out for all to see whenever he wants to listen to music.
Be careful with this, though, because a lot of places you wouldn't expect don't support the + sign. For example, when I had to renew my SSL cert after the debian ssl debacle, I had a problem: the email I used was me+thawte@gmail.com. Thawte has no problem sending junk email to this address, and they accepted it just fine when I initially accepted the cert, but when I went to renew the it, their system was silently dropping the plus and throwing an error when I tried to confirm the reissue.
Their technical support was no help either. After talking with some douche called "Jeremy E", he simply informed me that the best he could do was change the address to me.thawte@gmail.com, which of course is equivalent to methawte@gmail.com and not my address. He then did this without waiting for my approval and sent the reissue information to some total stranger (I tried to register it, it was taken). I never did get them to change the address, nor to reissue the cert.
You would think that a business like SSL certs that charges extortionate (hundreds of dollars) prices for something that an automated system does would have a working email system, but no. I ended up having to buy a new cert from another company.
Lots of tracking software has ways to account for people like you. Xiti, for example, loads both a script and a small image. They err on the side of caution and assume that people who load the image but not the script have fairly restrictive settings. So, Xiti tells me that after filtering out bots 2% of my users have js dis-activated, although I believe that the actual percentage is lower. If I assume that all of those users have flash disabled and combine that with the fact that Javascript-based Google analytics tells me that 3% of my users either don't have Flash or that it doesn't recognize their flash version, at most 5% of my visitors don't have Flash and the actual number is probably a small fraction of that.
In general, I do not advocate the use of Flash in web design, but you cannot deny that it is nearly ubiquitous.
At least for your own site, google analytics will not only tell you what proportion of users have flash installed but also which version.
For example, on my sites (4 medium/smallish commercial sites with around 1000 visits per day each) 45% of users have Flash 10.0 r12, 53% have some version of Flash 9, and 3% have "not set," which is probably split between users with no Flash and users with something that blocks GA's data collection (things such as no script could do this, but I think this is unlikely as noscript has google whitelisted by default).
So, for my sites, the number of users without Flash installed is probably between 0 and 3%. I think it is closer to 3% than 0, but anybody else's guess is as good as mine.
The point is, the overwhelming majority of users have flash.
That tidbit aside, I must say that IMHO using Flash is for anything but movies and games is incredibly bad form. There is no reason whatsoever to have flash menus, navigation or anything else that can be handled in html, css or javascript. Flash destroys accessibility, distracts from your message and is just annoying for visitors.
Of course they did. They are, after all, on the right side of Swedish law. All that remains to be seen is whether we can say the same about the Swedish courts.
I dare say that very few of us here are qualified to make that statement, probably including you, my good sir. In fact, I believe that this trial is happening because a large number of lawmakers, layers, and judges in the Sweden can't even answer that question yet. We will soon see if they are breaking the law in Sweden or not, though.
Dude, are you trolling? Why can we not discuss this issue without some idiot like you hijacking the thread? Look, copyright infringment is not theft. You can argue the im/morality of copyright infringement all you want, and I and many others might agree with you if you argue that it is wrong and can support the statement.
However, copyright infringement and theft are not the same fucking thing already. Jesus.
Honestly, if the OP is in the situation where he is trying to find and patch holes, it would probably be a better idea to do a little homework and start the project over again and use good security techniques when writing.
It is not that hard, really. You just have to remember never to trust user input. That means that you filter all of it, you don't rely on cookies for access control, and you don't trust the variables that the browser sent you (such as $_SESSION['http_referer']).
As far as filtering is concerned, remember that php has a lot of filters at your disposal (just remember to strip new lines out of email addresses yourself, the filter misses that one). Another word of warning: if you are echoing user input out onto a page, it is much easier to use bb syntax than allow html tags through strip tags: the danger is that an attacker can get javascript attributes the filter and it is better just to avoid it.
I have 50 accounts for 20 or so users spread across 4 domains that use google apps for domains. Although google apps is not perfect, I have never once heard of the kind of issues you are describing. I would posit that the issue is your client.
However, I agree that google apps is not appropriate for a large organization such as a school. It works for us because we are small enough that simply relying on individual email users to back up their gmail accounts once a week in case google should go bankrupt is more cost effective than anything else. The uptime that we have had from google apps is better than anything we can do in house for a similar price.
Slashdot Mirror
If, on the other hand, all you do is write little five page or less memos or letters, Office is clearly superior to LaTeX. But then, you would really need to convince me that MS Office saves you any time whatsoever over OpenOffice or KOffice.
Unless, of course, your argument is that Office is faster because you know it already, which really is not valid for the rest of us.
But the ammunition will be different. When you see a truck, you hit it with High Explosive (HE) or heavy machine gun fire. If you see a tank, you hit it with Kinetic Energy (KE) or High Explosive Anti-Tank (HEAT) rounds.
There is good reason for this. If you hit a tank with something that just explodes and rains shrapnel, the hit will just bounce off, maybe destroying the optics but that is about it. You have to pierce the armor, which you do by hitting it with something very heavy and slender (such as a rod of depleted uranium) traveling at high speed that focuses a bunch of energy on one point. The heat from the collision and spalling from the armor itself then destroys whatever is behind the armor.
This does not work for a truck. If you hit it with a KE round, the round will just sail right through it. If there is nothing vital (the driver, engine, fuel lines, etc) where the KE round happens to pass, then the truck will just keep rolling. That is why you hit it with HE or MG fire. The many small bits of metal from an exploding HE round have a much higher chance of hitting something vital than the single big chunk from a KE round.
As far as a tank is concerned, you usually only get one or two shots at it before it or its buddies start returning fire. If you hit it with the wrong ammunition, he is going to kill you.
It should be noted that the inverse is also true. Making vehicles such as a truck look highly armored increases their survivability in certain situations because AT rounds are rarer than lighter ammunition and an infantry squad with a machine gun is not going attack a tank.
A better solution than taking money, banning their product for a set time.
No, that would be punishing EU member states at least as much Intel. Have you looked at the market for servers lately? Desktops? Laptops? Intel is subject to anti-competition laws because it has a dominant market position. If you were to suddenly cut their products out of the market, that would hurt every manufacturer of IT equipment and every business that uses said equipment. That is a great way to hurt the EU's ability to perform in the world market.
The reason a fine is useful is precisely because the costs are passed on to Intel customers worldwide, not just in the EU. This means that it really is Intel that is paying for its behavior on a global scale.
No. At the very least, this gives schools a bargaining chip when negotiating journal packages with Elsevier.
Also, anything that brings the sickening relationship between doctors and pharmaceutical companies to light is a good thing. Many times, doctors will prescribe the latest (expensive) drug to a patient when a generic does the job just as well precisely because the pharmaceutical companies bombard them with this kind of semi-false information. People need to be aware of this.
Here is a great quote from the article:
Building a case for dismissal is so time-consuming, costly and draining for principals and administrators that many say they don't make the effort except in the most egregious cases. The vast majority of firings stem from blatant misconduct, including sexual abuse, other immoral or illegal behavior, insubordination or repeated violation of rules such as showing up on time.
Either the journalist is a product of the LA school system or the LA school system mandates that teachers show up late.
More to the point, however, is that this is actually not such a bad system, no matter what populist journalists wishing to stir up anti-(government|teacher's union) sentiment says. As somebody with managerial experience in the federal government, I can attest that establishing a pattern of misconduct is a very effective way to get people fired. However, it requires that administrators keep their paperwork in order. There has to be a written record in place establishing that the misconduct actually happened. This requirement is a good thing in government positions because it keeps people from getting fired for political reasons and thus helps prevent nepotism and cronyism. The horror stories that you hear about the impossibility of firing bad employees always come from inept administrators who could not be bothered to properly manage their personnel and want to blame the system for their failings.
Is the EU even a government?
That depends who you ask. The functionalists would say yes, the realists would say no and the constructivists would say sort of. Theorists of multi-level governance would say that the whole concept of a sovereign state is over and done with but most of us have yet to realise it.
Also, it is true that fines are a significant portion of the EU's small budget.
Governments need someone to pay for the huge debt they're accumulating. Hey Intel, these guys, they have money. We can take it and spend it on programs that will make us look good, potentially reelected.
Sickening.
Please. It is a government. It can just print money if it wants to. As painful as the resulting inflation would be, that would be preferable to damaging the reputation of the rule of law on the continent.
Cue the brainwashed anti-trust crowd.
I think you misspelled "believers free economies"
I have been using Ubuntu since 5.04 and Mandrake since 9.1. Mandriva's implementation of KDE (3 and 4) is one of the best around. It is certainly better than Kubuntu. If you want an easy but reliable desktop Linux based on KDE, Mandriva is the way to go. Mandriva has better gtk integration, better update notification, and better a better configuration center than any other kde implementation that I have seen.
Also, Mandriva's fonts are the best I have seen in Linux. I don't know why everybody else does not do whatever it is that they do, but they are smooth as silk.
Next time that shit happens, I'm first in line at the ferry (excepting the elderly, the very young, and the preggers).
$next_in_line = preg_replace('/you/', 'me', $next_in_line);
Or does pregger have another meaning?
Anyone seriously think movies are going to die?
No. We can only hope...
Have you ever tried to walk 72 miles in a day? Even back in my infantry days I would have called you nuts.
One mile every 20 minutes (one km every 12 min for most of you) is actually quite brisk, and pretty fatiguing over 2 or 3 hours, let alone 24. Factor in time to eat, drink, change socks, cover blisters, relieve your self, etc, and you are looking at having to run-walk to keep that kind of pace.
While actual athletes may be able to do more, I would put the absolute limit for a fit person at around 40 miles in 24 hours if the person must carry nothing, the weather is neither too hot nor too cold and the person is very motivated. A fit person could comfortably walk around 18 miles in a day, and 12 miles per day at a sustained rate.
For the overwhelming majority of humanity (with the possible exceptions of Kenyans...) 72 miles in a 24 hour period is simply not possible.
In the case at hand, the site is 27 kilometers (a little more than 18 miles) from the Vatican.
No, he is asking people to do what they have not done in the history of capitalism: ignore what something costs.
Value in this context is just synonym for cost-benefit analysis, which is a concept people are already quite familiar with even if they do not always apply it. The reason Microsoft wants OSS vendors to change their vocabulary is that they are aware that they have lost the cost-benefit fight under the old vocabulary and they want OSS marketeers to help them re-open the same debate under new terms.
The longer you can keep people redefining their premises, the longer you can hinder actual comparison and continue to market software with the good will that Jerry Seinfeld can sell you.
but even they do a better job than the other channels in at least having someone there to provide token opposition. Their bias is very evident because they provide the contrast right there.
I believe that you misspelled "strawman" a couple of times. Let me fix that:
Yhey do a better job than the other channels in at least having someone there to provide strawman opposition.Their bias is very evident because they provide the strawman right there.
The UK government has in fact authorized the IWF to look at child pornography.
If you don't believe me, read for yourself:
http://www.cps.gov.uk/Publications/docs/mousexoffences.pdf
I am all for punishing the bad guys and everything, but how would US authorities have jurisdiction over an attack that happened on Estonia from Russia? Can they prove that it crossed American networks?
While it does involve having thousands of addresses, this kind of thing is pretty easy to automate, given what your goals are. For example, I use this tool to determine which country my visitors are in and display the relevant contact information (show the French address to people in France, the Belgian one to people in Belgium, etc). I have a cron job set up to update the database once a week; it is fully automatic and very reliable.
If you need to be more specific, this guy has a php class that can supposedly give you information as specific as city, or you can write your own using the db you can download here, although I can't personally vouch for either. You could also parse the hostnames in your server and only allow service providers in your area.
Also, google code has a really good tutorial for a client side application if your server is limited in its capabilities.
Either way, it sounds from the summary like you have access to a database of ip address ranges you want to allow. Just set up a cron job to download it and parse it.
Now yes, from a strict legal point of view, I've no doubt that still counts of piracy.
IANAL, but I believe that unless it happens on the high seas and involves forcefully robbing or commandeering a vessel, from a strict legal point of view it is not piracy.
As a former infantryman, I can tell you that you are really over thinking this. Rugged means more than just hard to break. It also means that it is a single piece (so he can't loose part of it) and that those pieces are easily replaceable.
Forget the charger, and get him something nice that runs on AAs. Lots of military equipment, such as the AN/PRC-14 night vision goggles or the little radios that squads carry around, run on AAs and so he is sure never to have a shortage. You literally have boxes of these things just floating around where ever you go. They aren't that heavy, they are virtually unbreakable, and he will have to carry some anyway. When I was in, guys bought electric shavers that ran on AAs expressly for this reason.
Besides, his unit will appreciate him not flipping a mirror out for all to see whenever he wants to listen to music.
Be careful with this, though, because a lot of places you wouldn't expect don't support the + sign. For example, when I had to renew my SSL cert after the debian ssl debacle, I had a problem: the email I used was me+thawte@gmail.com. Thawte has no problem sending junk email to this address, and they accepted it just fine when I initially accepted the cert, but when I went to renew the it, their system was silently dropping the plus and throwing an error when I tried to confirm the reissue.
Their technical support was no help either. After talking with some douche called "Jeremy E", he simply informed me that the best he could do was change the address to me.thawte@gmail.com, which of course is equivalent to methawte@gmail.com and not my address. He then did this without waiting for my approval and sent the reissue information to some total stranger (I tried to register it, it was taken). I never did get them to change the address, nor to reissue the cert.
You would think that a business like SSL certs that charges extortionate (hundreds of dollars) prices for something that an automated system does would have a working email system, but no. I ended up having to buy a new cert from another company.
By the way, THAWTE AND VERISIGN SUCK
Lots of tracking software has ways to account for people like you. Xiti, for example, loads both a script and a small image. They err on the side of caution and assume that people who load the image but not the script have fairly restrictive settings. So, Xiti tells me that after filtering out bots 2% of my users have js dis-activated, although I believe that the actual percentage is lower. If I assume that all of those users have flash disabled and combine that with the fact that Javascript-based Google analytics tells me that 3% of my users either don't have Flash or that it doesn't recognize their flash version, at most 5% of my visitors don't have Flash and the actual number is probably a small fraction of that.
In general, I do not advocate the use of Flash in web design, but you cannot deny that it is nearly ubiquitous.
At least for your own site, google analytics will not only tell you what proportion of users have flash installed but also which version.
For example, on my sites (4 medium/smallish commercial sites with around 1000 visits per day each) 45% of users have Flash 10.0 r12, 53% have some version of Flash 9, and 3% have "not set," which is probably split between users with no Flash and users with something that blocks GA's data collection (things such as no script could do this, but I think this is unlikely as noscript has google whitelisted by default).
So, for my sites, the number of users without Flash installed is probably between 0 and 3%. I think it is closer to 3% than 0, but anybody else's guess is as good as mine.
The point is, the overwhelming majority of users have flash.
That tidbit aside, I must say that IMHO using Flash is for anything but movies and games is incredibly bad form. There is no reason whatsoever to have flash menus, navigation or anything else that can be handled in html, css or javascript. Flash destroys accessibility, distracts from your message and is just annoying for visitors.
Of course they did. They are, after all, on the right side of Swedish law. All that remains to be seen is whether we can say the same about the Swedish courts.
I dare say that very few of us here are qualified to make that statement, probably including you, my good sir. In fact, I believe that this trial is happening because a large number of lawmakers, layers, and judges in the Sweden can't even answer that question yet. We will soon see if they are breaking the law in Sweden or not, though.
The Pirate Bay is about theft, plain and simple.
Dude, are you trolling? Why can we not discuss this issue without some idiot like you hijacking the thread? Look, copyright infringment is not theft. You can argue the im/morality of copyright infringement all you want, and I and many others might agree with you if you argue that it is wrong and can support the statement.
However, copyright infringement and theft are not the same fucking thing already. Jesus.
exactly right.
Honestly, if the OP is in the situation where he is trying to find and patch holes, it would probably be a better idea to do a little homework and start the project over again and use good security techniques when writing.
It is not that hard, really. You just have to remember never to trust user input. That means that you filter all of it, you don't rely on cookies for access control, and you don't trust the variables that the browser sent you (such as $_SESSION['http_referer']).
As far as filtering is concerned, remember that php has a lot of filters at your disposal (just remember to strip new lines out of email addresses yourself, the filter misses that one). Another word of warning: if you are echoing user input out onto a page, it is much easier to use bb syntax than allow html tags through strip tags: the danger is that an attacker can get javascript attributes the filter and it is better just to avoid it.
I have 50 accounts for 20 or so users spread across 4 domains that use google apps for domains. Although google apps is not perfect, I have never once heard of the kind of issues you are describing. I would posit that the issue is your client.
However, I agree that google apps is not appropriate for a large organization such as a school. It works for us because we are small enough that simply relying on individual email users to back up their gmail accounts once a week in case google should go bankrupt is more cost effective than anything else. The uptime that we have had from google apps is better than anything we can do in house for a similar price.