Government run education simply doesn't need to be any good - the government has a monopoly. They take your tax dollars by force and then require you to attend school.
Sure, you can enroll in any number of private schools, but you will still pay for government run schools.
The only way out of this that ensures even poor kids get an education is charters and vouchers. No unions, no teachers riding tenure all the way to their pension days. Government (aka taxpayers) still pay for every kid to get an education - and the schools need to compete for enrollment.
Create a Government monopoly in anything and you will get a bunch of people who will do just enough work to not get fired.
We've moved away from very expensive smartboards and higher-end computers in favor of cheap projectors, whiteboards, and chromebooks.
The chromebooks are strictly for web-research, writing, spreadsheets, and presentations.
The projectors help a teacher share content with a class during a lesson.
We have some iPads, but we only use them to run some special-ed specific reading apps. They do help the kids read material that would otherwise be very difficult for some.
The past few years have been filled with schools blindly deploying smartboards, iPads, and high end windows/apple laptops. Unfortunately many of these districts didn't put in enough support systems or integrate the technology into the curriculum. We are only deploying tech where we see tangible benefits to classroom activities.
I left the iTunes Apple TV world for a Synology box running plex and Amazon Fire TVs running the Plex client. I got tired of encoding all my media in a format that iTunes was happy with and I got really tired of having to restart iTunes.
Apple is trying to do what Roku and Amazon Fire TV have been doing for a few years now....big surprise.
I've worked in regulated high-security industries (finance and medical). I've seen small to midsize shops with TERRIBLE security practices that did not have the necessary security staff onsite to keep their systems secure.
These small to midsize companies would absolutely benefit from the security groups at larger outsourced firms. Frankly, after seeing the credit union/community banking IT industry from the inside - I can say for certain the big service providers are way more proactive about securing their systems.
Are all cloud providers this good? Probably not. This is simply a resource issue. Many cloud providers have dedicated security teams auditing their systems/infrastructure. Almost no small to midsize company has this ability. Using a good cloud provider will give them a piece of that security team.
I was a network manager at a small community bank. We also had FIOS/DSL/Cable interconnecting our sites - and we had a channelized DS3 as a backup.
Granted, we had almost all of our systems in-house, but many many of our competitors were "serviced" banks in that they had very few IT system in-house. Those companies also had redundant network connectivity.
The cloud is simply a way to cost-share someone else's computer. Your network design should have reliability built in whether your IT is cloud based or in-house if your business requires high availability.
Having a crappy internet connection has nothing to do with cloud VS in-house. Especially if your enterprise spans multiple locations.
I bought one of these figuring that it was a cheap unlocked phone with another year of Prime built in. Amazon's biggest failure was building an Android phone without leveraging any of the strengths of Android.
That was just stupid.
If they simply built the phone around stock Android and then added in their "ecosystem" it would have been a worthwhile device.
Telephones - we pushed that out as well. Gone are the expensive PITA PBX systems. Now we drop an IP phone into a classroom or on a desk - a few mouse clicks and we're done.
At our school, here's the list of stuff we pushed into the cloud in the last few years:
Student information system (attendance, grades, IEPs, lesson plans - the lot). This eliminated an RDP server farm and a couple of SQL servers.
Email - this eliminated a couple of Exchange Servers.
Student data storage and applications - Google Apps eliminated most of our Windows and Mac student workstations. Chromebooks are cheap and easy.
Firewalls/VPN - management of these devices is now in the cloud - goodbye to local firmware updates and far more flexible provisioning of devices.
MDM - no longer in-house.
In each case we realized cost savings simply due to sharing someone else's infrastructure instead of home-brewing our own. Security concerns in the cloud are overblown by those trying to save their jobs. The fact is that most small to medium size businesses can not afford to have the security talent that most cloud companies have.
We don't make our own water or power - why should we try to build all of our IT?
Fiat Chrysler was recently fined for inadequate protections on Jeep gas tanks, but I did not see that on the page linked above - so the list isn't entirely current.
NHTSA may not be the fastest regulatory group out there, but they have shown a willingness to go after car companies that do not issue timely fixes for dangerous problems. Automotive software bugs will eventually kill people. Unfortunately, NHTSA probably won't care until then.
...are the way to go. Laser is fast and doesn't suffer from clogged print heads. Generic toner cartridges have gotten much better in the last few years. I can't remember the last time I had a bad one.
I played baseball as a kid and I made the local paper a few times in my youth. My local library can get, pretty much, a copy of any newspaper that's ever been printed and archived.
I assume other countries like France have similar archives. Would this "right to be forgotten" also apply to paper archives? What about public records such as financial transactions?
It seems irresponsible of us to deprive future generations of these potential historical records.
I remember this nonsense in college 15 years ago. Windows updates were a joke back then - surely the worlds largest software company has had time to sort out this issue.
I went from being a "windows guy" in college to the "anything but windows" guy now. Our company does run some windows servers in very limited roles, but everything else is Mac OS, Linux, or Chromebooks. We have 4 desktops running windows due to applications that only run on windows.
I put my family members on Mac OS or Chromebooks - and life has been much easier on me. No family members call me for help any more - it's fantastic.
Windows users need to take a hard look in the mirror and ask themselves why they are running that stuff. It most cases it is simply not necessary any longer.
"But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced or objectively interpreted – and you create a nation of law-breakers – and then you cash in on guilt."
I'm not sure what this has to do with government protecting failing business models.
I'm not under 30 - and I don't worship Ayn Rand.
My dad died of cancer while I was in college - I constantly think about being older, weaker...etc. That's why I started saving for retirement at a young age.
Social safety nets are a good thing for the most needy. I have a problem with Government that has grown beyond "safety nets" into dictating winners and losers in our economy.
Unfortunately it is not a strange world view to many, less liberty-minded, people.
As a society, we've gotten to the point where we tolerate zero risk in our daily lives. So much so that society wants government to decide what is good for us.
This is a terrible way to live. I want options in my life and I want the free market to create them. I don't want government restricting options available to me, or restricting those that would provide those options to me.
Police have been very clear that their tactics changed after columbine. The one big change was do not wait for backup in an active shooter scenario. If you are armed, you charge and return fire as soon as possible.
The only reason police adopted this strategy post Columbine is that they know to slow or stop a mass shooting you need to return fire immediately.
Anti-gunners seem to boil down defensive gun uses to winning and losing.
An armed population is a deterrence. There is a reason why many mass shootings happen at schools. They are completely disarmed soft targets. Shooters know there won't be anyone to shoot back at them.
I guarantee a mass shooter will move much more slowly and carefully if even ONE person shoots back. It's human nature. Slowing a mass shooter is one way to save lives - you don't need to hit the guy between the eyes for there to be a benefit.
I temporarily ran a copper network cable out of a window to another building while our building to building fiber was being installed.
Over a weekend we had huge lightning storms. The voltages induced in the unshielded twisted pair cable hanging outside 3 floors up fried both switches on either end of the cable.
I'm going to keep posting this until everyone uses it. It's a free telephone filtering service. Just enable your simultaneous ring feature on your landline and nomorobo looks at every call that rings your phone. If the originating number is on their blocklist, they pickup the call.
It's a fantastic service.
Phone companies should embrace these filtering technologies. If it wasn't for nomorobo I would have gotten rid of my landline a long time ago.
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Government run education simply doesn't need to be any good - the government has a monopoly. They take your tax dollars by force and then require you to attend school.
Sure, you can enroll in any number of private schools, but you will still pay for government run schools.
The only way out of this that ensures even poor kids get an education is charters and vouchers. No unions, no teachers riding tenure all the way to their pension days. Government (aka taxpayers) still pay for every kid to get an education - and the schools need to compete for enrollment.
Create a Government monopoly in anything and you will get a bunch of people who will do just enough work to not get fired.
We've moved away from very expensive smartboards and higher-end computers in favor of cheap projectors, whiteboards, and chromebooks.
The chromebooks are strictly for web-research, writing, spreadsheets, and presentations.
The projectors help a teacher share content with a class during a lesson.
We have some iPads, but we only use them to run some special-ed specific reading apps. They do help the kids read material that would otherwise be very difficult for some.
The past few years have been filled with schools blindly deploying smartboards, iPads, and high end windows/apple laptops. Unfortunately many of these districts didn't put in enough support systems or integrate the technology into the curriculum. We are only deploying tech where we see tangible benefits to classroom activities.
I left the iTunes Apple TV world for a Synology box running plex and Amazon Fire TVs running the Plex client. I got tired of encoding all my media in a format that iTunes was happy with and I got really tired of having to restart iTunes.
Apple is trying to do what Roku and Amazon Fire TV have been doing for a few years now....big surprise.
If you look around you can find a Proscan Android 4.4 tablet. My local grocery store is selling them for $49.00.
It's not a full-function computer - but it's close. Add in a cheap bluetooth keyboard and you've got more computing capability than I had in college.
Your $20 target might be impossible to reach.
I've worked in regulated high-security industries (finance and medical). I've seen small to midsize shops with TERRIBLE security practices that did not have the necessary security staff onsite to keep their systems secure.
These small to midsize companies would absolutely benefit from the security groups at larger outsourced firms. Frankly, after seeing the credit union/community banking IT industry from the inside - I can say for certain the big service providers are way more proactive about securing their systems.
Are all cloud providers this good? Probably not. This is simply a resource issue. Many cloud providers have dedicated security teams auditing their systems/infrastructure. Almost no small to midsize company has this ability. Using a good cloud provider will give them a piece of that security team.
I was a network manager at a small community bank. We also had FIOS/DSL/Cable interconnecting our sites - and we had a channelized DS3 as a backup.
Granted, we had almost all of our systems in-house, but many many of our competitors were "serviced" banks in that they had very few IT system in-house. Those companies also had redundant network connectivity.
The cloud is simply a way to cost-share someone else's computer. Your network design should have reliability built in whether your IT is cloud based or in-house if your business requires high availability.
Having a crappy internet connection has nothing to do with cloud VS in-house. Especially if your enterprise spans multiple locations.
We have FIOS and Comcast cable connecting our locations. We haven't had a significant internet connectivity failure in years.
If we did have a reliability problem with our network providers, we would account for that with redundant internet connections.
This isn't the 90s anymore. Internet connectivity is pretty reliable - and many areas do have more than one choice of network provider.
I bought one of these figuring that it was a cheap unlocked phone with another year of Prime built in. Amazon's biggest failure was building an Android phone without leveraging any of the strengths of Android.
That was just stupid.
If they simply built the phone around stock Android and then added in their "ecosystem" it would have been a worthwhile device.
Telephones - we pushed that out as well. Gone are the expensive PITA PBX systems. Now we drop an IP phone into a classroom or on a desk - a few mouse clicks and we're done.
At our school, here's the list of stuff we pushed into the cloud in the last few years:
Student information system (attendance, grades, IEPs, lesson plans - the lot). This eliminated an RDP server farm and a couple of SQL servers.
Email - this eliminated a couple of Exchange Servers.
Student data storage and applications - Google Apps eliminated most of our Windows and Mac student workstations. Chromebooks are cheap and easy.
Firewalls/VPN - management of these devices is now in the cloud - goodbye to local firmware updates and far more flexible provisioning of devices.
MDM - no longer in-house.
In each case we realized cost savings simply due to sharing someone else's infrastructure instead of home-brewing our own. Security concerns in the cloud are overblown by those trying to save their jobs. The fact is that most small to medium size businesses can not afford to have the security talent that most cloud companies have.
We don't make our own water or power - why should we try to build all of our IT?
NHTSA publishes a list of civil settlements here:
http://www.nhtsa.gov/Laws+&+Re...
Fiat Chrysler was recently fined for inadequate protections on Jeep gas tanks, but I did not see that on the page linked above - so the list isn't entirely current.
NHTSA may not be the fastest regulatory group out there, but they have shown a willingness to go after car companies that do not issue timely fixes for dangerous problems. Automotive software bugs will eventually kill people. Unfortunately, NHTSA probably won't care until then.
...are the way to go. Laser is fast and doesn't suffer from clogged print heads. Generic toner cartridges have gotten much better in the last few years. I can't remember the last time I had a bad one.
I played baseball as a kid and I made the local paper a few times in my youth. My local library can get, pretty much, a copy of any newspaper that's ever been printed and archived.
I assume other countries like France have similar archives. Would this "right to be forgotten" also apply to paper archives? What about public records such as financial transactions?
It seems irresponsible of us to deprive future generations of these potential historical records.
I remember this nonsense in college 15 years ago. Windows updates were a joke back then - surely the worlds largest software company has had time to sort out this issue.
I went from being a "windows guy" in college to the "anything but windows" guy now. Our company does run some windows servers in very limited roles, but everything else is Mac OS, Linux, or Chromebooks. We have 4 desktops running windows due to applications that only run on windows.
I put my family members on Mac OS or Chromebooks - and life has been much easier on me. No family members call me for help any more - it's fantastic.
Windows users need to take a hard look in the mirror and ask themselves why they are running that stuff. It most cases it is simply not necessary any longer.
"But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced or objectively interpreted – and you create a nation of law-breakers – and then you cash in on guilt."
It doesn't matter if the guy in front of you has to slam on the brakes or not. If you rear-end someone it's your fault.
Your following distance should be appropriate for the speeds being traveled. One car length for every 10 MPH of speed.
What if the guy in front of you has to hit the brakes hard to avoid hitting a kid? Is it still his fault that you ran into the back of him?
Has everyone forgotten what was taught in Driver's Ed????
I'm not sure what this has to do with government protecting failing business models.
I'm not under 30 - and I don't worship Ayn Rand.
My dad died of cancer while I was in college - I constantly think about being older, weaker...etc. That's why I started saving for retirement at a young age.
Social safety nets are a good thing for the most needy. I have a problem with Government that has grown beyond "safety nets" into dictating winners and losers in our economy.
That can not be permitted to continue.
Laws protecting an outdated business model are far different that laws that protect individual laborers.
I'm OK with workplace safety laws. I'm not OK with laws that prop up obsolete businesses.
I want to pay market prices for everything I consume. No one suggested that anything or anyone should be free.
Unfortunately it is not a strange world view to many, less liberty-minded, people.
As a society, we've gotten to the point where we tolerate zero risk in our daily lives. So much so that society wants government to decide what is good for us.
This is a terrible way to live. I want options in my life and I want the free market to create them. I don't want government restricting options available to me, or restricting those that would provide those options to me.
Police have been very clear that their tactics changed after columbine. The one big change was do not wait for backup in an active shooter scenario. If you are armed, you charge and return fire as soon as possible.
The only reason police adopted this strategy post Columbine is that they know to slow or stop a mass shooting you need to return fire immediately.
Seems to work for our purposes. We attach monitor mounts to it when necessary. The adjustable base is built like a tank.
http://www.ergotron.com/Produc...
At $700 it's not cheap, but a good sitting desk can run that much.
Anti-gunners seem to boil down defensive gun uses to winning and losing.
An armed population is a deterrence. There is a reason why many mass shootings happen at schools. They are completely disarmed soft targets. Shooters know there won't be anyone to shoot back at them.
I guarantee a mass shooter will move much more slowly and carefully if even ONE person shoots back. It's human nature. Slowing a mass shooter is one way to save lives - you don't need to hit the guy between the eyes for there to be a benefit.
I temporarily ran a copper network cable out of a window to another building while our building to building fiber was being installed.
Over a weekend we had huge lightning storms. The voltages induced in the unshielded twisted pair cable hanging outside 3 floors up fried both switches on either end of the cable.
That was an $8000 mistake.
I'm going to keep posting this until everyone uses it. It's a free telephone filtering service. Just enable your simultaneous ring feature on your landline and nomorobo looks at every call that rings your phone. If the originating number is on their blocklist, they pickup the call.
It's a fantastic service.
Phone companies should embrace these filtering technologies. If it wasn't for nomorobo I would have gotten rid of my landline a long time ago.