Shouldn't it be "University standardizes on Apple hardware to run OS X and Windows?" That's what they did here. So that way, when it takes an extra few months for a package like SPSS to run (or be certified) on a new version of OS X, your academic program can still use the software under Windows.
Actually, the "smug" episode could have been describing many Apple loonies, rather than Hybrid owners. Any consumer product - or a free software product - isn't as much of a meaningful personal statement as many seem to believe. In fact, I'd argue that with 6 billion people on this planet, none of us are statistically likely to be saying or doing anything meaningful beyond a small circle of people we know, assuming one ever moves out of one's parents' basement. The way people try to carve out personal identities by the crap they buy or use instead of by the people in their lives is just sad and empty. And it's pretty much the norm in the US now. It's the triumph of the ephemeral. Like Slashdot:)
If you're buying in bulk, the Tier 1 PC makers are far more likely to deal on nicely-equipped, business-class notebooks or desktops. 25% less, in a lot of cases. Lenovo, HP and even Dell are all willing to drop well below the Apple price. If you're buying in quanitited of 500 or more, they'll even come in well below the Apple educational price. Apple makes a big deal out of dropping a few percent. Yippee. Sorry, for a million dollar order, a vendor ought to actually work hard, instead of acting like you ought to feel honored that they'd sell them to you. Seriously - when they act like a local iTunes server is the big incentive they can offer (not that we'd get any revenue out of it), you have to wonder what they've been smoking. Relationships with vendors only go so far as cash on the barrelhead. And that's the way it should be. We know what to expect from them, and vice-versa. It's a transaction, not a relationship.
I am not a lawyer. But I do work in higher ed, in IT, and this comes up a lot. I call it "FERPES" - in it's worst form, a malady that causes one to believe FERPA entitles college students to go to school but still be "off the grid" like they were living in a crazy shack in Montana with no utilities and no address. FERPA basically covers two things 1) personal information (not directory info) and 2) academic information like grades. Directory information can be given to anyone - the University just has to have a policy saying under what circumstances it can be shared and with whom, and what constitutes directory information. FERPA requires that we have a policy - it does NOT dictate what that policy has to be. Things like name, email address, etc. can be listed. Student email, stored on a system paid for or contracted for by the University are likely NOT student records - it's not grades. In fact, on a system belonging to the University, it's likely the property of the school. Or the state, if it's a public institution. And, by the way, FERPA doesn't actually prohibit anyone working for the University who has any thin excuse to see the information from doing so, including consultants and contractors. Yes, the liability isn't transferred, but the authority is. I realize that some schools have taken the extreme position that students have to be treated like they're all in the witness protection program, but it's not true. As a side note, the financial penalties are almost a non-issue - STUDENTS CANNOT SUE UNDER FERPA. The law doesn't allow it, and that's been upheld in court. Students have NO STANDING to sue. The Department of Education can fine an institution, but that's so rare it might as well be a Bigfoot sighting. FERPA is toothless. Some states may have laws that extend additional protection to students, but that's not FERPA.
I want 6-hour Call-To-Repair on critical hardware. I can get that from actual enterprise vendors. For not much more than standard 24x7 hardware support, in most cases. Depending on the system (think of a two-socket quad-core VMware ESX host with 16 GB of RAM running 16 to 20 virtual servers - by the way, that works), next business day isn't good enough. And if the system is in any way tied to generating revenue, trust me - spares and support contracts are required. Apple just isn't there.
They've probably got no obligation to do so - they don't have to make sure a gambling addict can't call his bookie from the office, either. And they don't have to assign a minder to an alcoholic at a company function where anyone could walk up and grab a bottle of beer. Let's not forget that ignoring his looking at porn at work could land them in a sexual harassment lawsuit brought by another employee for creating a hostile work environment. That's part of the problem for employers - they're expected to create a perfect environment for everyone. It's sometimes impossible, and this guy's likely on the wrong side of that. Also, he can claim he's addicted, but in real life, you don't get to screw up at work repeatedly no matter what. If you have an addiction, and you're not actually getting treatment for it (especially if the issue has come up before), you don't have a lot of protection. Even if you are getting treatment, if there are behavior problems at work, your protection goes away pretty quickly. And your employer can demand documentation of any medical condition you're getting treated for if it falls under some sort of ADA-type claim (there are also state laws that come into this) or if you're asking for time off without pay under the Family and Medical Leave Act. You don't get to keep 100% of your privacy and claim that you have an illness or disability at the same time.
I'm a systems and network administrator at a University. Frankly, we'd never dream of doing this to anyone on campus (faculty, staff or student). Unless there was compelling evidence of illegal activity, or activity that had a serious impact on the network, we leave them alone. Even staff - supervising staff is their manager's job, not the responsibility of the IT group. If he was sharing his password and outside folks were crowding up the terminal server, or he was running a warez site, sure. But this?
Here's a legit situation I can see coming up - if a faculty person was somehow using 90% of our internet bandwidth, we'd have to have a chat. Sure, it might be for their research, but that doesn't matter in that case. It's a shared resource, there's a limited (by the University) budget, and it's not an academic freedom issue. It might be convenient for one of the physics faculty to have a supercollider as well, but it's not in the University's budget. You have to partner with someone outside, or get grants, etc. Every instituation has limits and priorities.
But this? This is bizarre. The only awkward situation I can think of in some states is that state schools can fall under open records laws that require that the public can check on certain information (in some states, browser histories have come up in the past). In that case, as a state employee, they might be violating the open records law by going out of their way to hide their activity. Hell, even under a Patriot Act search, we'd have to give them whatever information we had about a user, but we're not obligated to keep information to track back every outbound internet connection - even under CALEA. We probably can't link a PAT assignment on the outside of our firewall to an inside machine for more than a couple of days, at best We just don't have the space to keep the logs.
I'll bet - given things like pausing and skipping commercials, changing channels, flipping tuners, that they've got a pretty good idea of whether or not it's being activly watched vs. just sitting there. I've always wondered if you use a TiVo remote to turn your TV on, whether it also sends a signal to the box letting it know that there was some activity? Seems obvious. And you could figure out power on / power off based on whether or not the user does other things within a few seconds.
The APIs that Novell (and Cisco, and a bunch of other vendors need) did change quite a bit, and even the ones that didn't change much between May/June and release required a complete redesign of anything that relied on the GINA or implemented their own authentication mechanism (like Novell's NMAS). Cisco's had issues with their VPN client and its startup dialog as well.
If Microsoft doesn't relax how they're letting developers hook in for login and authentication (or add a significant amount of flexibility), a lot of third-party vendors implementing authentication or security mechanisms are going to have a lot of problems.
iTunes is "just" an end-user application, and the iPod just a device. There could be a change in behavior in Vista that causes a communications problem that can lead to problems. Of course, the Zune doesn't work yet with Vista either, so it's not too shocking Apple is having problems. I'm just surprised that they're not out in front of it more - it's revenue. Anyone who is getting a new computer with Vista is likely to postpone purchases from iTunes for a while.
If you're an edu site, your CALs can be based on Full Time Equivalent Faculty/Staff plus FTE students if you have the student option. It's not based on the number of computers at all. And it's always based on the previous year's numbers, because that's what you have when you renew. If you've got a Microsoft Campus Agreement, any audit would be pointless, unless you're lying about your numbers. Novell's ALA/SLA for higher ed/K-12 can work in a similar manner. It's often worth doing it that way - it saves a lot of headaches in terms of counting computers.
Nothing you said actually argues with my point - if you looked at computer sales in 1993, even networked PCs, non-PC sales were trivial in comparison, and most PCs were networked with technologies other than TCP/IP. The web browser was one of the first times that something became a major market BEFORE Microsoft got involved. Albiet a market that didn't charge for its product. I'll bet 95% of the population didn't even know what the hell a Sun workstation was.
What? In what way was TCP/IP commonplace in the "market" in 1994? How are you defining "market"? Sure, it was common on Unix workstations, minicomputers, etc. and in University settings, but there were certainly more computers worldwide networked with either IPX or NetBIOS/NetBEUI than TCP/IP. How many Macs of that vintage were still sharing files via just Appletalk? Remember, Ethernet wasn't even a slam-dunk in 1994. 10-BaseF wasn't around until 1994 or so. 10-BaseT was 1991. There wasn't 100MB ethernet until 1995. Wnat redundancy? Well, spanning-tree was still being argued about up through 1993/1994 between the IEEE and DEC standards, if I remember correctly. So that meant FDDI.
Even for "regular" people with internet access in 1994, it was a great way to 1) read email 2) speed up Usenet delivery and 3) telnet to various internet-based BBSes. Maybe you'd been using Gopher, and you just installed NCSA Mosaic. But you were a tiny, tiny fraction of the population. Maybe you were using AOL.
You can slam Microsoft for missing the boat, and for hesitating because they couldn't figure out how to make extra money on it, but you can say the same thing of a lot of other companies at the time. And when they figured out the importance, they missed the point and fumbled around a lot. But making it sound like every computer except Windows had TCP/IP on it in 1994 (and, as a side note, you could use TCP/IP on Windows 3.1, I was doing it at the time) is just goofy, considering that 80% or 90% of the computers around in 1994 were running MS-DOS or DOS/Windows.
Sure it is. I've heard it from lots of folks over the years. More often, though, from people who used UNIX before Linux existed. I'm actually having trouble remembering when they were introduced - might've been UFS with 4.2BSD, and then the feature migrated back into System V along with the file system?
As a side note, there are file systems that support hard links but not soft - VMS' ODS-2 (On-Disk Structure) comes to mind. Not sure if they changed the behavior with ODS-5 or not, I haven't used OpenVMS since 7.2.
Hey, that's OK, right? Everyone's doing it. Well, maybe not, but the boss didn't know. Well, actually, he knew, but it wasn't his fault. Anyway, given that, it's going to be expensive for all the lawyers, and fines and so forth. So, Apple needs to charge everyone an extra $4.99. Ok? Of course, the SarbOx advice was probably as good as the stock option advice.
SarbOx - the swiss army knife of lame corporate excuses.
No, but it would be funny watching Jobs try to run a company that made enterprise- and carrier-grade networking equipment, and have customers that actually want 24x7 service. Apple has never offered enterprise support, and won't. It's too expensive, and it's not flashy. Take a look at the service contracts available for Xserve RAID arrays - you can't get things like 24x7 4-hour response or 6-hour call-to-repair on an Xserve RAID. Or an Xserve for that matter. If you want that kind of service, you're buying it from a Cisco, IBM, HP, EMC, etc. Apple gear, for all the press attention, is a tiny fraction of worldwide technology spending.
It's actually pretty good - the overall list, for administration & configuration, the management console, symmetric key recovery (essential in any enterprise deployment), and even the way they want the licensing to work shows that they have a pretty good grasp of the issue. A lot of this stuff would be good for any organization that was going from a departmental model for licensing and evaluating software to a more centrallized approach.
So, anyone want to see a feature added where we can score the original post as well? You know, I heard that Microsoft's also behind putting fluoride in the water, as well. Also, the outbreak of bedbugs in many major urban areas.
Re:Magazines and the Web
on
The eBook, Mark 2
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Honestly, the primary uses of Wikipedia by folks in higher ed (faculty, students and staff) are probably 1) settling pop culture arguments that can't be settled via IMDB and 2) doing research about things like Wikipedia. Sorry, but they still haven't figured out a good way to deal with the kooks. Anyone who actually knows something is always going to give up before the kooks, because they almost certainly have better things to do in "real life". The great thing about the internet, of course, is it gives the kooks a sense of community - it's an echo chamber. You see the same thing with the neocons in the Bush administration, talk radio, and here on Slashdot, where a lot of folks are convinced that Linux must count for a third of the desktops out there, and it'll overtake Windows any day now.
Yeah, sure. And the fact that OpenOffice will run malicious macros isn't an issue? And it doesn't have the AV integration that the Microsoft Office products have? Oh, that's right, it's Slashdot. The open source folks never repeat history.
Where are you? A basic apartment - one bedroom, and not filthy or dangerous, can be between $1,000 and $2,000 a month in some markets. Current cost of living numbers estimate that a single adult with two kids sharing a two bedroom apartment in northern NJ needs about $40,000 a year to pay for housing and stay above the poverty line, and even that's really pushing it once you factor in car and insurance.
Spy on a large customer that might be planning to jump to another vendor for major IT services? Spy on business partners or VARs? Flat out, the reason there are so many leaks surrounding HP is that the behavior (starting during Fiorina's reign) of the management and the board was terrible. Of course there were leaks. It's the only way to ever put the brakes on the amoral behavior of scumbags like these. The way they've been treaing people for years? Of course there are disgruntled people leaking information. They're lucky it hasn't been worse. I expect, now that Dunn has been wounded finding the leaker, the board's going to have to pull an "Old Yeller" and get her off before everyone else is contaminated. It may be too late, though.
Hell, let's just go all the way and chuck them in jail. Then, we can onshore all sorts of jobs since we'd have a broad-based captive workforce. Then we could compete with Chinese prison labor!
Slashdot Mirror
Shouldn't it be "University standardizes on Apple hardware to run OS X and Windows?" That's what they did here. So that way, when it takes an extra few months for a package like SPSS to run (or be certified) on a new version of OS X, your academic program can still use the software under Windows.
Actually, the "smug" episode could have been describing many Apple loonies, rather than Hybrid owners. Any consumer product - or a free software product - isn't as much of a meaningful personal statement as many seem to believe. In fact, I'd argue that with 6 billion people on this planet, none of us are statistically likely to be saying or doing anything meaningful beyond a small circle of people we know, assuming one ever moves out of one's parents' basement. The way people try to carve out personal identities by the crap they buy or use instead of by the people in their lives is just sad and empty. And it's pretty much the norm in the US now. It's the triumph of the ephemeral. Like Slashdot :)
If you're buying in bulk, the Tier 1 PC makers are far more likely to deal on nicely-equipped, business-class notebooks or desktops. 25% less, in a lot of cases. Lenovo, HP and even Dell are all willing to drop well below the Apple price. If you're buying in quanitited of 500 or more, they'll even come in well below the Apple educational price. Apple makes a big deal out of dropping a few percent. Yippee. Sorry, for a million dollar order, a vendor ought to actually work hard, instead of acting like you ought to feel honored that they'd sell them to you. Seriously - when they act like a local iTunes server is the big incentive they can offer (not that we'd get any revenue out of it), you have to wonder what they've been smoking. Relationships with vendors only go so far as cash on the barrelhead. And that's the way it should be. We know what to expect from them, and vice-versa. It's a transaction, not a relationship.
I am not a lawyer. But I do work in higher ed, in IT, and this comes up a lot. I call it "FERPES" - in it's worst form, a malady that causes one to believe FERPA entitles college students to go to school but still be "off the grid" like they were living in a crazy shack in Montana with no utilities and no address. FERPA basically covers two things 1) personal information (not directory info) and 2) academic information like grades. Directory information can be given to anyone - the University just has to have a policy saying under what circumstances it can be shared and with whom, and what constitutes directory information. FERPA requires that we have a policy - it does NOT dictate what that policy has to be. Things like name, email address, etc. can be listed. Student email, stored on a system paid for or contracted for by the University are likely NOT student records - it's not grades. In fact, on a system belonging to the University, it's likely the property of the school. Or the state, if it's a public institution. And, by the way, FERPA doesn't actually prohibit anyone working for the University who has any thin excuse to see the information from doing so, including consultants and contractors. Yes, the liability isn't transferred, but the authority is. I realize that some schools have taken the extreme position that students have to be treated like they're all in the witness protection program, but it's not true. As a side note, the financial penalties are almost a non-issue - STUDENTS CANNOT SUE UNDER FERPA. The law doesn't allow it, and that's been upheld in court. Students have NO STANDING to sue. The Department of Education can fine an institution, but that's so rare it might as well be a Bigfoot sighting. FERPA is toothless. Some states may have laws that extend additional protection to students, but that's not FERPA.
I want 6-hour Call-To-Repair on critical hardware. I can get that from actual enterprise vendors. For not much more than standard 24x7 hardware support, in most cases. Depending on the system (think of a two-socket quad-core VMware ESX host with 16 GB of RAM running 16 to 20 virtual servers - by the way, that works), next business day isn't good enough. And if the system is in any way tied to generating revenue, trust me - spares and support contracts are required. Apple just isn't there.
They've probably got no obligation to do so - they don't have to make sure a gambling addict can't call his bookie from the office, either. And they don't have to assign a minder to an alcoholic at a company function where anyone could walk up and grab a bottle of beer. Let's not forget that ignoring his looking at porn at work could land them in a sexual harassment lawsuit brought by another employee for creating a hostile work environment. That's part of the problem for employers - they're expected to create a perfect environment for everyone. It's sometimes impossible, and this guy's likely on the wrong side of that. Also, he can claim he's addicted, but in real life, you don't get to screw up at work repeatedly no matter what. If you have an addiction, and you're not actually getting treatment for it (especially if the issue has come up before), you don't have a lot of protection. Even if you are getting treatment, if there are behavior problems at work, your protection goes away pretty quickly. And your employer can demand documentation of any medical condition you're getting treated for if it falls under some sort of ADA-type claim (there are also state laws that come into this) or if you're asking for time off without pay under the Family and Medical Leave Act. You don't get to keep 100% of your privacy and claim that you have an illness or disability at the same time.
Here's a legit situation I can see coming up - if a faculty person was somehow using 90% of our internet bandwidth, we'd have to have a chat. Sure, it might be for their research, but that doesn't matter in that case. It's a shared resource, there's a limited (by the University) budget, and it's not an academic freedom issue. It might be convenient for one of the physics faculty to have a supercollider as well, but it's not in the University's budget. You have to partner with someone outside, or get grants, etc. Every instituation has limits and priorities.
But this? This is bizarre. The only awkward situation I can think of in some states is that state schools can fall under open records laws that require that the public can check on certain information (in some states, browser histories have come up in the past). In that case, as a state employee, they might be violating the open records law by going out of their way to hide their activity. Hell, even under a Patriot Act search, we'd have to give them whatever information we had about a user, but we're not obligated to keep information to track back every outbound internet connection - even under CALEA. We probably can't link a PAT assignment on the outside of our firewall to an inside machine for more than a couple of days, at best We just don't have the space to keep the logs.
I'll bet - given things like pausing and skipping commercials, changing channels, flipping tuners, that they've got a pretty good idea of whether or not it's being activly watched vs. just sitting there. I've always wondered if you use a TiVo remote to turn your TV on, whether it also sends a signal to the box letting it know that there was some activity? Seems obvious. And you could figure out power on / power off based on whether or not the user does other things within a few seconds.
If Microsoft doesn't relax how they're letting developers hook in for login and authentication (or add a significant amount of flexibility), a lot of third-party vendors implementing authentication or security mechanisms are going to have a lot of problems.
iTunes is "just" an end-user application, and the iPod just a device. There could be a change in behavior in Vista that causes a communications problem that can lead to problems. Of course, the Zune doesn't work yet with Vista either, so it's not too shocking Apple is having problems. I'm just surprised that they're not out in front of it more - it's revenue. Anyone who is getting a new computer with Vista is likely to postpone purchases from iTunes for a while.
If you're an edu site, your CALs can be based on Full Time Equivalent Faculty/Staff plus FTE students if you have the student option. It's not based on the number of computers at all. And it's always based on the previous year's numbers, because that's what you have when you renew. If you've got a Microsoft Campus Agreement, any audit would be pointless, unless you're lying about your numbers. Novell's ALA/SLA for higher ed/K-12 can work in a similar manner. It's often worth doing it that way - it saves a lot of headaches in terms of counting computers.
Nothing you said actually argues with my point - if you looked at computer sales in 1993, even networked PCs, non-PC sales were trivial in comparison, and most PCs were networked with technologies other than TCP/IP. The web browser was one of the first times that something became a major market BEFORE Microsoft got involved. Albiet a market that didn't charge for its product. I'll bet 95% of the population didn't even know what the hell a Sun workstation was.
What? In what way was TCP/IP commonplace in the "market" in 1994? How are you defining "market"? Sure, it was common on Unix workstations, minicomputers, etc. and in University settings, but there were certainly more computers worldwide networked with either IPX or NetBIOS/NetBEUI than TCP/IP. How many Macs of that vintage were still sharing files via just Appletalk? Remember, Ethernet wasn't even a slam-dunk in 1994. 10-BaseF wasn't around until 1994 or so. 10-BaseT was 1991. There wasn't 100MB ethernet until 1995. Wnat redundancy? Well, spanning-tree was still being argued about up through 1993/1994 between the IEEE and DEC standards, if I remember correctly. So that meant FDDI.
Even for "regular" people with internet access in 1994, it was a great way to 1) read email 2) speed up Usenet delivery and 3) telnet to various internet-based BBSes. Maybe you'd been using Gopher, and you just installed NCSA Mosaic. But you were a tiny, tiny fraction of the population. Maybe you were using AOL.
You can slam Microsoft for missing the boat, and for hesitating because they couldn't figure out how to make extra money on it, but you can say the same thing of a lot of other companies at the time. And when they figured out the importance, they missed the point and fumbled around a lot. But making it sound like every computer except Windows had TCP/IP on it in 1994 (and, as a side note, you could use TCP/IP on Windows 3.1, I was doing it at the time) is just goofy, considering that 80% or 90% of the computers around in 1994 were running MS-DOS or DOS/Windows.
As a side note, there are file systems that support hard links but not soft - VMS' ODS-2 (On-Disk Structure) comes to mind. Not sure if they changed the behavior with ODS-5 or not, I haven't used OpenVMS since 7.2.
SarbOx - the swiss army knife of lame corporate excuses.
No, but it would be funny watching Jobs try to run a company that made enterprise- and carrier-grade networking equipment, and have customers that actually want 24x7 service. Apple has never offered enterprise support, and won't. It's too expensive, and it's not flashy. Take a look at the service contracts available for Xserve RAID arrays - you can't get things like 24x7 4-hour response or 6-hour call-to-repair on an Xserve RAID. Or an Xserve for that matter. If you want that kind of service, you're buying it from a Cisco, IBM, HP, EMC, etc. Apple gear, for all the press attention, is a tiny fraction of worldwide technology spending.
How about MacPhone? No, that sounds too much like "McJob" or "McMansion".
It's actually pretty good - the overall list, for administration & configuration, the management console, symmetric key recovery (essential in any enterprise deployment), and even the way they want the licensing to work shows that they have a pretty good grasp of the issue. A lot of this stuff would be good for any organization that was going from a departmental model for licensing and evaluating software to a more centrallized approach.
>That's the real challenge - devising a digital storage format in which presentation can be used to apply context to the data.
I know! ASCII art!!!!
So, anyone want to see a feature added where we can score the original post as well? You know, I heard that Microsoft's also behind putting fluoride in the water, as well. Also, the outbreak of bedbugs in many major urban areas.
Honestly, the primary uses of Wikipedia by folks in higher ed (faculty, students and staff) are probably 1) settling pop culture arguments that can't be settled via IMDB and 2) doing research about things like Wikipedia. Sorry, but they still haven't figured out a good way to deal with the kooks. Anyone who actually knows something is always going to give up before the kooks, because they almost certainly have better things to do in "real life". The great thing about the internet, of course, is it gives the kooks a sense of community - it's an echo chamber. You see the same thing with the neocons in the Bush administration, talk radio, and here on Slashdot, where a lot of folks are convinced that Linux must count for a third of the desktops out there, and it'll overtake Windows any day now.
That almost certainly includes application- and driver-related crash dumps. In the case of the apps, I would doubt the OS crashed.
Yeah, sure. And the fact that OpenOffice will run malicious macros isn't an issue? And it doesn't have the AV integration that the Microsoft Office products have? Oh, that's right, it's Slashdot. The open source folks never repeat history.
Where are you? A basic apartment - one bedroom, and not filthy or dangerous, can be between $1,000 and $2,000 a month in some markets. Current cost of living numbers estimate that a single adult with two kids sharing a two bedroom apartment in northern NJ needs about $40,000 a year to pay for housing and stay above the poverty line, and even that's really pushing it once you factor in car and insurance.
Spy on a large customer that might be planning to jump to another vendor for major IT services? Spy on business partners or VARs? Flat out, the reason there are so many leaks surrounding HP is that the behavior (starting during Fiorina's reign) of the management and the board was terrible. Of course there were leaks. It's the only way to ever put the brakes on the amoral behavior of scumbags like these. The way they've been treaing people for years? Of course there are disgruntled people leaking information. They're lucky it hasn't been worse. I expect, now that Dunn has been wounded finding the leaker, the board's going to have to pull an "Old Yeller" and get her off before everyone else is contaminated. It may be too late, though.
Hell, let's just go all the way and chuck them in jail. Then, we can onshore all sorts of jobs since we'd have a broad-based captive workforce. Then we could compete with Chinese prison labor!