I have to agree here. In the last 5 years I have managed over 1500 Dell desktops, laptops and workstations, and it is not very common to have to chat with someone in Laos or wherever the Dell support team is these days.
To be fair, this is only for their business grade products (Optiplex, Latitude, Precision). I worked at a college helpdesk for several years and the Dell home products (see: Inspiron) are garbage. I have done a bit of side-by-side price comparison of Dell home and business machines, and for a similar spec machine you might pay 50 bucks more and get the 3 year NBD on site warranty, as opposed to the mail in 1 year warranty for home grade stuff.
While in college, I worked doing tier 2 support for the campus IT department, and every semester we would have professors come in trying to get some (usually archaic) material out to students electronically, only to find out that it wouldn't work on a Mac, or that students couldn't open a.docx file because they had a torrent copy of Office 2003. This was a great source of frustration for a lot of professors.
Then you had the ones that told you on the first day of class that you were not to bring your computer in to class, even though the institution required that all students purchase a laptop (on their own, not from a few defined models to make support easier).
Does anyone know if prisons use RFID technology to track prisoners? I feel like that might be a better use than tracking students.
How about parolees? High tech house arrest, could force checking in at home/PO office/rehab electronically... Of course, some kind of implanted or second layer of verification would be needed for this, but maybe its the way of the future.
This was a few years back, we had a few applications that could give us some insight on our PCs, but there were a lot of APs (about 60 IIRC) in a relatively small building. It was hard to get a good handle on which one was where, as the applications we had were not designed to analyze the amount of spectrum we had in the building.
The controller was supposed to "optimize" the channels automatically... By that it meant "default to 6" and we had to manually assign a channel to each AP.
Indeed, you should be fine! A single SSID across all access points is the way to go but, as the Cisco 1040 series seem to be 802.11n your choice of channels is limited.
Make sure you only use channel 1, 6 or 11 as the others overlap which can confuse clients; you are better off having two of your five arrays on identical channels than overlapping them. Just try to keep the access points with identical channels a reasonable distance apart, so that there is an obvious difference in signal strength.
I couldn't agree more on this. In the past I worked for a small college, and we were having terrible performance issues with a brand new Colubris (now HP) setup. After turning the broadcast power down on each of the APs, we still had clients jumping from AP to AP. After a lot of head scratching and bringing in a professional WLAN analysis contractor, we found that all of the APs were on channel 6. Adjusting them to a pattern to break this up cleaned up all of the issues for us.
I can't wait for the day when my house is raided because of all of my unregistered, unlicensed hammers.
Will there be a Brady Bill for hammers? I can have a sledge hammer, not more than 10 pounds, but there is a 3 day wait to buy a (concealed carry) 6 oz. tack hammer?
I have to agree, I generally like to buy my own new tech as I find things that peak my interest.
I have gotten a lot of nice non-tech gifts that I use on a daily basis- wallets, (analog) watch, and my favorite are benchmade knives. They even have a custom shop to make your own Griptilian series with different steel, colors and blade styles: http://www.benchmade.com/customize/default.aspx [benchmade.com]. Maybe add engraving of a special occasion, service or milestone in life.
I DVR virtually everything I want to watch, or at least pause the show for 5 minutes at the beginning and fast forward through live shows. I don't know the last time I actually watched a commercial.
With the proliferation of MPLS networks, this would not be all that hard to do on an organizational level. Host your servers in [Generic Non-Extradition Country] and link all of your sites/users via MPLS or VPN to your MPLS network, as well as any other "trusted" entities.
I used to work for a small college, and we would buy ~100 each desktop and laptops direct from dell per fiscal year (barring special CS etc projects). My manager was quoted around $1000 for a decent machine (core2duo when it was the high end 2 gigs of ram 19" square monitor) and I thought we were being gouged.
I literally did no more than go to dell.com and look at the deals, they had an optiplex with the same processor, 4gb of ram and a 22" widescreen for $539. When we called our dell rep and pitched a fit, they gave us a further discount, and we wound up saving tens of thousands of dollars.
Why shouldnt education and government be able to take advantage of "jope sixpack" deals?
Create an image partiton, and set your bootloader to offer a "Factory Restore", set a good windows password, and hope for the best. I figure if every time they boot, and they dont have ERD or something similar, they see something to do a restore (most windows machines come with it anyway) they will go that route, and format off all your data.
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I am fairly confident that the NSA has been keeping a copy for them.
That is not always the case. I worked for a university and we only used MAK licenses for production, KMS was too much of a PITA to deal with.
I have to agree here. In the last 5 years I have managed over 1500 Dell desktops, laptops and workstations, and it is not very common to have to chat with someone in Laos or wherever the Dell support team is these days.
To be fair, this is only for their business grade products (Optiplex, Latitude, Precision). I worked at a college helpdesk for several years and the Dell home products (see: Inspiron) are garbage. I have done a bit of side-by-side price comparison of Dell home and business machines, and for a similar spec machine you might pay 50 bucks more and get the 3 year NBD on site warranty, as opposed to the mail in 1 year warranty for home grade stuff.
While in college, I worked doing tier 2 support for the campus IT department, and every semester we would have professors come in trying to get some (usually archaic) material out to students electronically, only to find out that it wouldn't work on a Mac, or that students couldn't open a .docx file because they had a torrent copy of Office 2003. This was a great source of frustration for a lot of professors.
Then you had the ones that told you on the first day of class that you were not to bring your computer in to class, even though the institution required that all students purchase a laptop (on their own, not from a few defined models to make support easier).
Does anyone know if prisons use RFID technology to track prisoners? I feel like that might be a better use than tracking students. How about parolees? High tech house arrest, could force checking in at home/PO office/rehab electronically... Of course, some kind of implanted or second layer of verification would be needed for this, but maybe its the way of the future.
Maybe it was totally random- à la Steve Jobs?
This was a few years back, we had a few applications that could give us some insight on our PCs, but there were a lot of APs (about 60 IIRC) in a relatively small building. It was hard to get a good handle on which one was where, as the applications we had were not designed to analyze the amount of spectrum we had in the building.
The controller was supposed to "optimize" the channels automatically... By that it meant "default to 6" and we had to manually assign a channel to each AP.
Indeed, you should be fine! A single SSID across all access points is the way to go but, as the Cisco 1040 series seem to be 802.11n your choice of channels is limited.
Make sure you only use channel 1, 6 or 11 as the others overlap which can confuse clients; you are better off having two of your five arrays on identical channels than overlapping them. Just try to keep the access points with identical channels a reasonable distance apart, so that there is an obvious difference in signal strength.
I couldn't agree more on this. In the past I worked for a small college, and we were having terrible performance issues with a brand new Colubris (now HP) setup. After turning the broadcast power down on each of the APs, we still had clients jumping from AP to AP. After a lot of head scratching and bringing in a professional WLAN analysis contractor, we found that all of the APs were on channel 6. Adjusting them to a pattern to break this up cleaned up all of the issues for us.
I can't wait for the day when my house is raided because of all of my unregistered, unlicensed hammers. Will there be a Brady Bill for hammers? I can have a sledge hammer, not more than 10 pounds, but there is a 3 day wait to buy a (concealed carry) 6 oz. tack hammer?
I have to agree, I generally like to buy my own new tech as I find things that peak my interest. I have gotten a lot of nice non-tech gifts that I use on a daily basis- wallets, (analog) watch, and my favorite are benchmade knives. They even have a custom shop to make your own Griptilian series with different steel, colors and blade styles: http://www.benchmade.com/customize/default.aspx [benchmade.com]. Maybe add engraving of a special occasion, service or milestone in life.
I DVR virtually everything I want to watch, or at least pause the show for 5 minutes at the beginning and fast forward through live shows. I don't know the last time I actually watched a commercial.
I wish I had mod points. This made my afternoon.
Mine's in my mom's basement.
It probably wont take you long to walk over and power it on then...
With the proliferation of MPLS networks, this would not be all that hard to do on an organizational level. Host your servers in [Generic Non-Extradition Country] and link all of your sites/users via MPLS or VPN to your MPLS network, as well as any other "trusted" entities.
I used to work for a small college, and we would buy ~100 each desktop and laptops direct from dell per fiscal year (barring special CS etc projects). My manager was quoted around $1000 for a decent machine (core2duo when it was the high end 2 gigs of ram 19" square monitor) and I thought we were being gouged. I literally did no more than go to dell.com and look at the deals, they had an optiplex with the same processor, 4gb of ram and a 22" widescreen for $539. When we called our dell rep and pitched a fit, they gave us a further discount, and we wound up saving tens of thousands of dollars. Why shouldnt education and government be able to take advantage of "jope sixpack" deals?
Create an image partiton, and set your bootloader to offer a "Factory Restore", set a good windows password, and hope for the best. I figure if every time they boot, and they dont have ERD or something similar, they see something to do a restore (most windows machines come with it anyway) they will go that route, and format off all your data.
Flash drives, lots of flash drives. Drag and Drop. Come on...
I can make netscape my browser, just like all the people who call me and ask for support...