I have heard that when IIS4 gets bogged down, the first thing it does is stops serving to Netscape browsers (all non-IE browsers to be more specific).
I don't know if it's true.. but I have had the experience of trying to load a page from NS and IE at the same exact time using the same connection to a site that has been/.ed and the IE browswer would get the bandwidth... the NS browswer wouldn't.
If you click 'reload' on the Netscape browser 4 times, it seems to bypass this.
Anyone know any info that would validate this? I have a hard time believing it would be possible... but as I said, from my experience it seems to be the case.
Just in case someone from Apple is reading... I just built 3 BeOS machines. I would have preferred to just pick up some nice G3 machines... but I had no choice. There goes $7500+ in sales lost for Apple.
Not that that's such a huge figure, but if you add up all the people here that have said they built on Intel for a BeOS box, you begin to see something a bit more significant.
I have registered 4 domains for my business over the past week, and the final confirmation for each one came within 20 minutes. It used to take several days. As much as I hate NSI, I have to hand it to them - their response time has improved.
I haven't had to deal with their customer service... from my past experiences with them it has a *long* way to go before it would even be considered equal to that of the California Department of Motor Vehicles (lowest possible denominator).
Perhaps they have turned a new leaf now that they have competition. However, as far as I'm concerned, it's too little too late. They should have done this at least a year ago. Unless they lower their prices, I will be taking my business to register.com.
I would have to agree completely here. Its all about attinuation.
First we will get used to having a MS browser. Then the MS web server will naturally follow to support the proprietory features of the browser. Of course, bundled with the browser will be an e-mail client, which of course works best on your network with Exchange, so you better migrate to that too. Then you will be needing some tools to build applications that work with all the great MS software you have, because you cant make anything compatible without them, since none of the software MS is offering is open source. Next thing you know, most of the software you use is propritory MS garbage.
I thought the best thing about Linux was that it and most of the software you can use on it is open-source stuff. I don't understand how anyone could be wanting MS in the Linux arena - I thought MS was what we were trying to get away from.
I guess this marks the main difference between the newbies (who are only after mainstreaming Linux) and the more seasoned users (who just want good, open source software).
Just a thought before hitting the coffee...:) --SONET
"The Word Processing labs (the macs) were used frequently. Too bad students couldn't take their work home to keep working on it, unless you were the one student in a hundred who had a Mac at home."
Perhaps they should have educated the students on using the Macs. You can save to a PC formatted disk with PC Exchange enabled (which runs transparently) and save in Rich Text Format. I go between MacOS/Win32/Linux all of the time using this method and I've never had a problem with it... aside from when I use tables extensively. Most all word processors can read rtf anymore.
It is pretty difficult to hire what you would classify as a 'competent' computer staff with the dirt for money the administrators have to deal with. I'm certainly not siding with the suits here, but you must admit it's hard to hire a person with a great deal of computer knowledge for $26,000/yr when that same person could get a job making at least $100,000/yr plus great benefits and a nice sign-on bonus (assuming they are knowledgable) somewhere else.
The best computer programs I have seen implemented at the high school level are actually run by the students. They let the students create their own curriculum, supply them with the necessary books, and let them do what they need to do. You would think this would be a disaster and that the students would take advantage of the system, but it actually works quite well since the students tend to compete with one-another for knowledge, and they tend to be checks against one another.
A couple programs I have seen have the top students running the technology program for the entire school, including maintaining the school network, the school web site and web server, all of the classroom machines... all that good stuff. Not only do they learn a lot, but it also helps them to get some recognition and respect rather than just the athletes getting it all the time. When their work helps the rest of their classmates or when their work makes their school look good, they tend to get a great deal of respect.
I work at the elementary level, so this sort of thing gets difficult.:) The majority of my time at the school is actually spent volunteering (good thing I don't care much about money!). I do have a few helpers that know a great deal for their age, which I think is good too. But this level of education often needs community volunteers literate in technology to get things rolling.
I think it is much more productive to actually do something about the problems you see than to just go around and bitch about them.:) I hope I am doing this by volunteering my time. Just thought I would randomly throw that in.
Maybe some LUGs should go out and volunteer at schools that need help... find companies to donate hardware (486 machines are easily had when it comes to donations) and then set up nice little Linux labs for the students to use.
Wow, it's neat to see how jumbled my thoughts can get when it gets late.:D
Anyway, to bottom line it, I agree that the vast majority of 'computer staff' is incompetent, but I also think there is more of a reason than the hiring procedure behind it. I think the constructive approach concerned students should take would be to organize and plea/argue for a more active role in their technology program. Complaining about the administrators or teaching staff seldom gets anyone anywhere.
I've never heard of such software grants, I think you are mistaken. There are often reduced prices when you buy a 'site license' (which most often includes a license for 25 machines), but I guaruntee you that these companies don't give their software away. You are talking about a huge market here. Usually even the reduced prices aren't that great - they are usually way out of our reach at our school site.
As for Microsoft, the closest thing that Microsoft offers to what you are saying to schoools is an 'open license', and I know for sure that it is definately not free.
You might be confusing grants that different companies sometimes offer with site licenses. These grants require that you apply for them, and usually you are competing with a large number of other schools or organizations. One grant that I'm helping out with now has 400 other schools competing for it, and there is only one $3000 grant that will be awarded. Grants can be larger (even in the millions sometimes, though this is very very rare), but this usually means there are more organizations competing for it (often times thousands or tens of thousands). Chances of getting them are slim, and usually they choose the same schools or school districts repeatedly - which gets rather frustrating for the majority of the schools that repeatedly get nothing.
One school in a nearby district received a $1 million grant last year, and was awarded a $3 million grant for next year. It's especially frustrating to find after talking with some of the students that most of the technology isn't even being used.
As for the free software offers, I would be *really* intrested to see some URLs or phone numbers posted here. Otherwise, I would have to say that you are definately wrong about this.:)
Money is usually really scarce, yes. But just to clarify - most of the software runs on Macs. We run all PC's at our [elementary] site, but every title we own is hybrid MacOS/Windows.
It seems to me that most of the kids games these days are created with Macromedia Director or Macromedia Authorware, both of which port software fairly easily between the two plaforms.
As the technology coordinator of an elementary school, I don't buy much software because most of it is pretty bad. I have found that usually software that has good content is usually coded *really* bad (crashes regularly), and when I find software that runs decent (relative term) the content is pointless. It's pretty frustrating.
So, the kids learn how to actually use the computers most of the time rather than having them play useless games all the time. In the computer lab we take machines apart, they learn how to navigate through the file system I created, learn word processing skills, and they make extensive use of the Internet down to 2nd grade. I guess this is most useful for them to learn anyway.
I wish the software we have would run on Linux. Even more I wish the software companies would sell Linux versions of their software... but I realize this is a long way off if it ever happens. I am actually getting some Linux boxes together this weekend to deploy in a classroom or two in the next week or so (primarily for word processing and Internet access).
If MS suddenly went banannas and open-sourced every single app/OS they offered, would that suddenly change what everyone thought of them?
Would that make them more popular in the open source community? If it didn't, wouldn't that make the proponents of open source hypocrits?
Think about it, would you think differently about MS? After thinking about it myself, as an advocate of the 'open source movement', I came to the conclusion that I would still have the same dislike for MS, and I still wouldn't support them in any way - be it financially or otherwise. Am I the only one that comes to this conclusion?
If I'm not the only one, then this raises the question: if it really is the open-source model that is driving the success of Linux, then why wouldn't people feel differently about supporting MS if it was open-sourced?
I guess there could be lots of answers to this question. The first one that pops into my mind is that maybe it really isn't the fact that Linux is open-sourced that is creating its success, but instead the fact that Linux just isn't a MS product.
So, by following this thought process (which is fully based on my assumptions!), you can come to the conclusion that MS will not be any more successful by 'copying Linux' (and all other successful open-sourced software) and open-sourcing it's products. The only way MS can be successful is by not being MS.
Just another crazy thought that came out of yet another sleepless night.
That is quite a quantity of pages to serve up, wow! I think it would be *really* interesting to see the amount of data that was transferred to serve up that huge number of pages... do you have access to any log that might reveal that?
Whoops! My bad, the update can be had by clicking the 'Windows 95' tab here, then clicking on 'Year 2000 Fix' or something like that. I should have used preview hehe.
Not that I am a MS fan, but I downloaded the Y2K patch from the MS site about a week or two ago. I'm not sure that it works, but it is still offered in their Windows 95 updates section with tons of other patches and upgrades. I installed it on a bunch of clients on my network here.
As an educator in the state of California, I have to say that Pete Wilson did more for education in California than any single politician has ever done for our state in its history. Ohh yeah, Pete Wilson is a Republican. Whoops.
Sure, our state scores suck. But we have more non-English speakers in our state than any other. So you can't base anything on those. How can you expect students to do well on tests written in a language they can't understand?
So, now we have voted a democrat in who doesn't give a rat's ass about immigration. This is going to get interesting...
Ever taken a basic macro economics class? Taxes, like many other financial matters, are based on a bell-shaped curve. Because of this, you can lower tax rates across the board and have an increase in revenue. This of course is dependent upon where you are on the curve, and it is my belief that we are far beyond the apex. The democrats don't understand this concept and are going to suck us dry until they finally figure it out.
And don't bash Ronald, he rocks. Remember living in a patriotic country? I do, and RR was to thank for that. Now, with Clinton in office and his stupid actions, this county has become an embarassment.
anyone I know that has money doesn't have to take pictures around all the things they own, because it's no big deal to them that they own it... because they have so much money.:D
As an example, a friend of mine got accepted to a college his parents wanted him to get in to, and because he went there his parents bought him a $1.3 million house on a golf course 10 minutes from the school (the house is under his name). He has 4 very nice cars (NS-X, Mercedes, etc) and gets $15,000 per month allowance on top of that for spending money.
All that and he doesn't have a single picture of himself with a single thing he owns. Because none of it is a big deal to him.. he's used to it.
By the way, he is about the most miserable person I know... nothing to look forward to. Quite sad if you think about it.
Perhaps if those of us that e-mailed NSI don't get personal responses from NSI stating they are going to remove us from their lists, we should call the 'people that matter' at home during dinner hour and ask them for a response then.:) Being that we now have all their home phone numbers and all thanks to this post.
If they lack respect for our privacy, why should we respect theirs? Heck, we *payed* them when we gave them our information, we had no choice, and nobody told us we were giving our private information away. If anyone deserves to lose their privacy between us and them, it's them.
Maybe we should group up and set a time to call if we don't get responses.:) Then keep calling till we get through.
Just a thought, probably a crazy one though. --SONET
Never thought of that. Whoever finally comes up with leasing X terminals or the like, with administration done at a central location like you mentioned... is going to parallel the cable industry in its deployment. Clever idea.:)
Now all you would need woudl be an idiot-proof GUI and lots of funding.
Not everything at the new NSI site is working. I have been trying to pay for a few domains I picked up by paying on-line with their 'secure payment system'. It isn't working, I keep getting errors. Hasn't been working since Friday night when they changed things over.
You would think that before they routed everyone to their new site that they would have checked to be sure everything was working properly.
Now my domains are going to expire and some dipshit speculator is probably going to pick them up. If they really wanted to make a difference with their services they should have done something to ban speculators. Those people need to get a life.
I can't wait 'till there is an alternative to NSI, I have had about enough from them. They act like a US government agency.
Slashdot Mirror
I have heard that when IIS4 gets bogged down, the first thing it does is stops serving to Netscape browsers (all non-IE browsers to be more specific).
/.ed and the IE browswer would get the bandwidth... the NS browswer wouldn't.
I don't know if it's true.. but I have had the experience of trying to load a page from NS and IE at the same exact time using the same connection to a site that has been
If you click 'reload' on the Netscape browser 4 times, it seems to bypass this.
Anyone know any info that would validate this? I have a hard time believing it would be possible... but as I said, from my experience it seems to be the case.
--SONET
Just in case someone from Apple is reading... I just built 3 BeOS machines. I would have preferred to just pick up some nice G3 machines... but I had no choice. There goes $7500+ in sales lost for Apple.
Not that that's such a huge figure, but if you add up all the people here that have said they built on Intel for a BeOS box, you begin to see something a bit more significant.
Just a thought...
--SONET
I have registered 4 domains for my business over the past week, and the final confirmation for each one came within 20 minutes. It used to take several days. As much as I hate NSI, I have to hand it to them - their response time has improved.
I haven't had to deal with their customer service... from my past experiences with them it has a *long* way to go before it would even be considered equal to that of the California Department of Motor Vehicles (lowest possible denominator).
Perhaps they have turned a new leaf now that they have competition. However, as far as I'm concerned, it's too little too late. They should have done this at least a year ago. Unless they lower their prices, I will be taking my business to register.com.
--SONET
Joke aside, nobody pointed out 'internet'. It's Internet.
:)
I would have to agree completely here. Its all about attinuation.
:)
First we will get used to having a MS browser. Then the MS web server will naturally follow to support the proprietory features of the browser. Of course, bundled with the browser will be an e-mail client, which of course works best on your network with Exchange, so you better migrate to that too. Then you will be needing some tools to build applications that work with all the great MS software you have, because you cant make anything compatible without them, since none of the software MS is offering is open source. Next thing you know, most of the software you use is propritory MS garbage.
I thought the best thing about Linux was that it and most of the software you can use on it is open-source stuff. I don't understand how anyone could be wanting MS in the Linux arena - I thought MS was what we were trying to get away from.
I guess this marks the main difference between the newbies (who are only after mainstreaming Linux) and the more seasoned users (who just want good, open source software).
Just a thought before hitting the coffee...
--SONET
"The Word Processing labs (the macs) were used frequently. Too bad students couldn't take their work home to keep working on it, unless you were the one student in a hundred who had a Mac at home."
:)
Perhaps they should have educated the students on using the Macs. You can save to a PC formatted disk with PC Exchange enabled (which runs transparently) and save in Rich Text Format. I go between MacOS/Win32/Linux all of the time using this method and I've never had a problem with it... aside from when I use tables extensively. Most all word processors can read rtf anymore.
Just had to throw that in.
--SONET
It is pretty difficult to hire what you would classify as a 'competent' computer staff with the dirt for money the administrators have to deal with. I'm certainly not siding with the suits here, but you must admit it's hard to hire a person with a great deal of computer knowledge for $26,000/yr when that same person could get a job making at least $100,000/yr plus great benefits and a nice sign-on bonus (assuming they are knowledgable) somewhere else.
:) The majority of my time at the school is actually spent volunteering (good thing I don't care much about money!). I do have a few helpers that know a great deal for their age, which I think is good too. But this level of education often needs community volunteers literate in technology to get things rolling.
:) I hope I am doing this by volunteering my time. Just thought I would randomly throw that in.
:D
The best computer programs I have seen implemented at the high school level are actually run by the students. They let the students create their own curriculum, supply them with the necessary books, and let them do what they need to do. You would think this would be a disaster and that the students would take advantage of the system, but it actually works quite well since the students tend to compete with one-another for knowledge, and they tend to be checks against one another.
A couple programs I have seen have the top students running the technology program for the entire school, including maintaining the school network, the school web site and web server, all of the classroom machines... all that good stuff. Not only do they learn a lot, but it also helps them to get some recognition and respect rather than just the athletes getting it all the time. When their work helps the rest of their classmates or when their work makes their school look good, they tend to get a great deal of respect.
I work at the elementary level, so this sort of thing gets difficult.
I think it is much more productive to actually do something about the problems you see than to just go around and bitch about them.
Maybe some LUGs should go out and volunteer at schools that need help... find companies to donate hardware (486 machines are easily had when it comes to donations) and then set up nice little Linux labs for the students to use.
Wow, it's neat to see how jumbled my thoughts can get when it gets late.
Anyway, to bottom line it, I agree that the vast majority of 'computer staff' is incompetent, but I also think there is more of a reason than the hiring procedure behind it. I think the constructive approach concerned students should take would be to organize and plea/argue for a more active role in their technology program. Complaining about the administrators or teaching staff seldom gets anyone anywhere.
Well that's my two cents...
--SONET
I've never heard of such software grants, I think you are mistaken. There are often reduced prices when you buy a 'site license' (which most often includes a license for 25 machines), but I guaruntee you that these companies don't give their software away. You are talking about a huge market here. Usually even the reduced prices aren't that great - they are usually way out of our reach at our school site.
As for Microsoft, the closest thing that Microsoft offers to what you are saying to schoools is an 'open license', and I know for sure that it is definately not free.
You might be confusing grants that different companies sometimes offer with site licenses. These grants require that you apply for them, and usually you are competing with a large number of other schools or organizations. One grant that I'm helping out with now has 400 other schools competing for it, and there is only one $3000 grant that will be awarded. Grants can be larger (even in the millions sometimes, though this is very very rare), but this usually means there are more organizations competing for it (often times thousands or tens of thousands). Chances of getting them are slim, and usually they choose the same schools or school districts repeatedly - which gets rather frustrating for the majority of the schools that repeatedly get nothing.
One school in a nearby district received a $1 million grant last year, and was awarded a $3 million grant for next year. It's especially frustrating to find after talking with some of the students that most of the technology isn't even being used.
As for the free software offers, I would be *really* intrested to see some URLs or phone numbers posted here. Otherwise, I would have to say that you are definately wrong about this.
--SONET
Money is usually really scarce, yes. But just to clarify - most of the software runs on Macs. We run all PC's at our [elementary] site, but every title we own is hybrid MacOS/Windows.
It seems to me that most of the kids games these days are created with Macromedia Director or Macromedia Authorware, both of which port software fairly easily between the two plaforms.
--SONET
As the technology coordinator of an elementary school, I don't buy much software because most of it is pretty bad. I have found that usually software that has good content is usually coded *really* bad (crashes regularly), and when I find software that runs decent (relative term) the content is pointless. It's pretty frustrating.
So, the kids learn how to actually use the computers most of the time rather than having them play useless games all the time. In the computer lab we take machines apart, they learn how to navigate through the file system I created, learn word processing skills, and they make extensive use of the Internet down to 2nd grade. I guess this is most useful for them to learn anyway.
I wish the software we have would run on Linux. Even more I wish the software companies would sell Linux versions of their software... but I realize this is a long way off if it ever happens. I am actually getting some Linux boxes together this weekend to deploy in a classroom or two in the next week or so (primarily for word processing and Internet access).
--SONET
Our School Technology Site
If MS suddenly went banannas and open-sourced every single app/OS they offered, would that suddenly change what everyone thought of them?
Would that make them more popular in the open source community? If it didn't, wouldn't that make the proponents of open source hypocrits?
Think about it, would you think differently about MS? After thinking about it myself, as an advocate of the 'open source movement', I came to the conclusion that I would still have the same dislike for MS, and I still wouldn't support them in any way - be it financially or otherwise. Am I the only one that comes to this conclusion?
If I'm not the only one, then this raises the question: if it really is the open-source model that is driving the success of Linux, then why wouldn't people feel differently about supporting MS if it was open-sourced?
I guess there could be lots of answers to this question. The first one that pops into my mind is that maybe it really isn't the fact that Linux is open-sourced that is creating its success, but instead the fact that Linux just isn't a MS product.
So, by following this thought process (which is fully based on my assumptions!), you can come to the conclusion that MS will not be any more successful by 'copying Linux' (and all other successful open-sourced software) and open-sourcing it's products. The only way MS can be successful is by not being MS.
Just another crazy thought that came out of yet another sleepless night.
--SONET
That is quite a quantity of pages to serve up, wow! I think it would be *really* interesting to see the amount of data that was transferred to serve up that huge number of pages... do you have access to any log that might reveal that?
:)
It would have to be a huge number.
Congrats,
--SONET
Whoops! My bad, the update can be had by clicking the 'Windows 95' tab here, then clicking on 'Year 2000 Fix' or something like that. I should have used preview hehe.
--SONET
Not that I am a MS fan, but I downloaded the Y2K patch from the MS site about a week or two ago. I'm not sure that it works, but it is still offered in their Windows 95 updates section with tons of other patches and upgrades. I installed it on a bunch of clients on my network here.
It's buried, but I got it at:
Y2K Update
Of course, one of their suggested updates is to upgrade to 98... go figure.
--SONET
As an educator in the state of California, I have to say that Pete Wilson did more for education in California than any single politician has ever done for our state in its history. Ohh yeah, Pete Wilson is a Republican. Whoops.
Sure, our state scores suck. But we have more non-English speakers in our state than any other. So you can't base anything on those. How can you expect students to do well on tests written in a language they can't understand?
So, now we have voted a democrat in who doesn't give a rat's ass about immigration. This is going to get interesting...
Ohh well, that's my 2c
--SONET
Ever taken a basic macro economics class? Taxes, like many other financial matters, are based on a bell-shaped curve. Because of this, you can lower tax rates across the board and have an increase in revenue. This of course is dependent upon where you are on the curve, and it is my belief that we are far beyond the apex. The democrats don't understand this concept and are going to suck us dry until they finally figure it out.
And don't bash Ronald, he rocks. Remember living in a patriotic country? I do, and RR was to thank for that. Now, with Clinton in office and his stupid actions, this county has become an embarassment.
--SONET
I liked his site too, but...
:D
anyone I know that has money doesn't have to take pictures around all the things they own, because it's no big deal to them that they own it... because they have so much money.
As an example, a friend of mine got accepted to a college his parents wanted him to get in to, and because he went there his parents bought him a $1.3 million house on a golf course 10 minutes from the school (the house is under his name). He has 4 very nice cars (NS-X, Mercedes, etc) and gets $15,000 per month allowance on top of that for spending money.
All that and he doesn't have a single picture of himself with a single thing he owns. Because none of it is a big deal to him.. he's used to it.
By the way, he is about the most miserable person I know... nothing to look forward to. Quite sad if you think about it.
--SONET
yeah, that was the first thing I felt... what a waste. *sigh*
Perhaps if those of us that e-mailed NSI don't get personal responses from NSI stating they are going to remove us from their lists, we should call the 'people that matter' at home during dinner hour and ask them for a response then. :) Being that we now have all their home phone numbers and all thanks to this post.
:) Then keep calling till we get through.
If they lack respect for our privacy, why should we respect theirs? Heck, we *payed* them when we gave them our information, we had no choice, and nobody told us we were giving our private information away. If anyone deserves to lose their privacy between us and them, it's them.
Maybe we should group up and set a time to call if we don't get responses.
Just a thought, probably a crazy one though.
--SONET
Never thought of that. Whoever finally comes up with leasing X terminals or the like, with administration done at a central location like you mentioned... is going to parallel the cable industry in its deployment. Clever idea. :)
Now all you would need woudl be an idiot-proof GUI and lots of funding.
Didn't I read somewhere that AOL/Netscape was thinking of using Linux for a similar project?
Not everything at the new NSI site is working. I have been trying to pay for a few domains I picked up by paying on-line with their 'secure payment system'. It isn't working, I keep getting errors. Hasn't been working since Friday night when they changed things over.
You would think that before they routed everyone to their new site that they would have checked to be sure everything was working properly.
Now my domains are going to expire and some dipshit speculator is probably going to pick them up. If they really wanted to make a difference with their services they should have done something to ban speculators. Those people need to get a life.
I can't wait 'till there is an alternative to NSI, I have had about enough from them. They act like a US government agency.
SONET