We have a custom student information system built on Access and SQL server. We run it on a Terminal Server farm. This allows Mac clients to run the software, and it also allows remote access via an SSL VPN appliance.
Terminal server was built for stuff like this. Many medium to large firms use terminal server to reduce end-client support costs, this also has the side effect of making the migration to Mac clients easier.
-ted
In the last few years, we've replaced every single Windows laptop or desktop with a Mac. We still run windows in the server room, and terminal servers for the apps that won't run on Mac OS (Quickbooks enterprise and our student information system).
Office runs just fine on Mac OS. Yes, entourage is a crappy replacement for Outlook, but it mostly does the job. The next version of Office for Mac OS is rumored to have a feature complete version of Outlook to replace entourage.
We still take security precautions like running real-time anti-virus, using good firewalls, VLANS, and web-content filtering.
Macs can replace Windows in many common office scenarios. Terminal server can also help bridge the application gap between Windows and Mac OS.
Microsoft and Intel seem to be similar in that neither company is any good at making "consumer-grade" products.
OK, I admit, Microsoft's keyboards, mice, and Xbox are fairly consumer friendly, but that's about it.
Intel did take a crack at the consumer market for a while with USB microscopes and that stupid Intel Reader device. The verdict from those experiments was, nice try - stick with making chips and software development tools and others will build products using your stuff.
I see Microsoft slowly evolving into that - developing software and services that others use to build end-user products, similar to Intel.
A long time ago I learned that all other security comes after physical security. Without physical security, nothing else matters.
Apple should remember this when giving out prototype next gen products to employees.
-ted
I wasn't bullied much during school, but when I was, I returned fire 10-fold.
I was smart enough to know my physical limits, run, and fight another day.
During one bullying episode I wasn't able to win, setting the kid's backpack on fire at a bus stop got his attention. I told him next time it would be him. That crap stopped right away.
Another episode warranted stealing a bully's bike and throwing it off of a bridge onto a 6 lane highway at night.
Finally, I helped a friend return the favor to a bully by smashing his car windows, slashing his tires, and then paying a tow truck to tow his vehicle to a garage REALLY far away.
Since bullies typically don't pick a fair fight, they don't deserve a fair fight.
Every time I see an article about remote wipe, someone inevitably recommends a Faraday cage to prevent reception of a remote wipe signal.
The question is, does any mobile platform enable a "dead-man" switch, or call-home switch? The thought is that if the phone does not call home after a specified period of time, the device wipes itself.
This would seem to be an effective countermeasure against the "Faraday cage" remote wipe work-around.
It might not be effective for those that use AT&T's service though....
My 6 year old DLP set is hardly old technology, yet it does not have HDMI inputs. It only has unencrypted DVI inputs and analog inputs.
If all the unencrypted outputs are disabled, how do I connect my HDTV to the set top box?
I refuse to throw away a $4000 television because big-content has a piracy problem. I have an antenna on my roof, and it does a damn good job of getting me 40 digital channels for free. Cable companies should be very careful where they tread. The internet and an antenna satisfy almost all of my TV needs.
I worked on cars during college. I was required to buy and maintain my own tools. If I broke a tool working on a car, I was required to repair or replace the tool out of my own pocket.
I went thousands of dollars into debt before even receiving my first paycheck. This is a standard practice in many trades.
I've probably got over $20,000 in tools, that I still own, from that job - and that was a requirement to keep that job. No tools, no job.
Long ago we decided that if anyone in our company breaches security by losing an access card, or sharing a password, we would not punish the person responsible if they came forward immediately.
This policy encourages a quick resolution to the security breach. A lost security card or password can be disabled or reset thereby limiting the damage the mistake caused.
Persecuting people that make mistakes only delays the notification process, and then delays the fix - putting more people/things at risk.
People make mistakes, they happen, and there is nothing you can do to prevent them.
We dispose of our e-waste through a disposal company that certifies the destruction of all the data on the devices. We started disposing of fax machines and copiers this way when we realized that these things store potentially confidential documents.
I'd like to see them speed un-boxing heavy servers, cursing at different rail types that require access above and below the rack space allocated to you. I'd also like to see them curse when there isn't enough power outlets available in the rack space you've rented, or there aren't enough cable management systems in place to hold all the stuff that connects your gear together.
Not the cheapest stuff, but Meru's access points and controllers will allow you to run all the APs on one channel, and the controller "load balances" the users across the available access points within reach of the client.
We use them at my place of employment (6 APs scattered throughout the building servicing around 200 laptops), and the performance is quite good.
The computers in my refrigerator, car, DVR, television, telephone, microwave, and assorted other appliances only let me do what they were designed to do, and nothing more.
Harmph...
The iPad is NOT a general purpose computing device. Get used to it. As computers become more integrated into our lives, they will look more like appliances.
Geez, if you want a computer, buy a computer, NOT AN APPLIANCE.
Having endured through tons of interfaces that required a stylus to properly operate, the iPhone was the first that combined a "finger friendly" environment with sleek hardware and the ability to plug into the apple ecosystem.
I lived through various early versions of Windows Mobile, Palm OS, Windows Mobile on Palm, blackberry, and Good Technology (exchange connectivity many years ago before Microsoft built it into the product).
At the time they were all great since that was the best we had. Once iPhone came out, all those other solutions felt like ancient technology.
A similar phenomenon happened with the iPod. MP3 players were around long before iPod, and they were cool, since that is all we had. Once iPod came out, all prior MP3 players looked clunky and old.
Apple has a habit of setting the bar for design, and a couple of years later, once everyone else catches up, people think that the state of the art always used to be this way. In reality, many technologies did exist before Apple did their version, but Apple has a way of raising the design standard, and forcing others to raise theirs.
I bought a $450 HP laptop for a family member this Christmas, The hardware was pretty nice for the money, but the system image HP put on the machine was appalling.
First - it's loaded with garbage, support links, trial versions, and a taskbar that has so much junk running, that fills half the width of the display.
Second - no recovery discs, or operating system installation discs what so ever. You need to "make" the discs from a supplied utility and a utility partition.
Hours later I had "de-crapified" the machine and burned her system recovery discs. After enduring that process, I can see how someone might want to pay to have this done.
What is pretty underhanded is that Best Buy appears to have no inventory that would give a buyer the ability to "opt-out" of their offering.
Apple seems to be the only major computer manufacturer that doesn't load up their systems with garbage, and they give you real OS installation discs, not system recovery discs.
I'm surprised that lots of comments here focus on the uselessness of technology in the classroom, instead of how technology does actually improve classroom instruction - on Slashdot no less.
Technology is not the "magic-bullet" for educating our youth. There is no "magic-bullet". The realization that is being generally accepted is that all students learn differently. Some more so than others. Our school teaches kids with dyslexia and mild Asperger's syndrome, and these kids, without a doubt, learn much differently than you or I. Technology helps tailor the instruction to the individual student's needs.
Many people here are extolling the virtues of pencil and paper - that's great if you can read and write, but there are tons of kids out there who have encoding/decoding language difficulties. Should these different students not learn science, math, or history due to their language problems?
Computers are an outstanding tool for these kids. They can write papers, even though they can not "hand-write" papers. They can learn mathematics without the frustration of attempting to read a math text.
The other argument for technology in the classroom: Many instructional materials, and "new knowledge" never make it to print. There are tons of videos made by REALLY GOOD teachers that can help less skilled teachers in a classroom. Sure, it would be nice to have teaching perfection in every classroom, but I can tell you first hand, there aren't enough of these perfect teachers to go around. Online video distribution does maximize the impact of these stellar teachers, and exposes kids to varying teaching styles.
Ultimately, the student, the parent, and the teacher are responsible for getting that student an education. Technology can only assist, it can't do the work.
IT guys typically don't abuse their authority. I've found, in the networks I've administered, management asks me to balance functionality with security. It's a very nebulous request, and typically it means that IT staff must use their best judgment when creating IT policies.
I've found the strictest policies are in place in financial firms, and the loosest policies are in place in education, and weirdly enough, law firms.
I was the network manager for a bank with 17 branches, and 3 office locations, about 200 or so employees, and about 40 servers (production, training, and test).
Total IT staff at the bank: 1 VP of network services (I reported to him), 1 network services manager (me), 2 help-desk/branch support guys (reported to me), 1 DBA, 1 core banking application support/administrator, 1 IT dept secretary (actually VP's secretary, but she helped us all out), and 2 operators to run the check processing/statement printing systems.
Now I am the IT director for a small private school. We have one school and one office/tutoring center, about 70 employees and 128 students, 20 servers, and a bit over 200 laptops and desktops, as well as other stuff (routers, switches, firewalls, remote access, VOIP telephones, printers, copiers, IP cameras, AV gear....etc)
Total IT staff at the school: 1 IT director, and two technology teachers. The teachers are in the classroom most of the day, but they help students and staff with the "help-desk" stuff, and escalate severe problems to me. Administrators come directly to me for support.
We use Postini, and postini handles the delivery of our mail. We have yet to have any organization block our mail while it is delivered by postini. It seems that most mail admins implicitly trust that postini's servers aren't spewing spam.
As far as postini's position on using SPF to identify spam:
Postini has investigated SPF and has decided not to implement it as a feature for inbound mail processing. Implementing SPF would add significant processing overhead without adding any appreciable effectiveness to the spam filtering. Almost all mail that would be blocked by SPF are also identified as spam by our spam filters.
In addition, Postini tracks the IP addresses of Fortune 500 corporations and the most popular internet sites such as Yahoo, Hotmail, eBay, etc. Adding these domains to the Approved Senders list, particularly at the organization level, is not usually needed and can result in spam appearing to be sent from those domains inadvertently getting to users' mailboxes. For this reason, Postini recommends against using the Approved Senders list in this way; rather, it should be used only for mail from senders that has previously been falsely quarantined as spam.
The other reason I have not published and SPF record: Verizon is hosting our DNS services, and when I asked their business services about adding SPF records to my domain the guy on the other end of the telephone had NO idea what I was talking about.
The iPhone has opened the data usage floodgates, and those gates will never be closed again. The horse is out of the barn, the toothpaste is out of the tube.
EVERY smartphone from now on will be a heavy data usage device. Droid is the next data heavy product. Heavy data use is the new "normal".
What will happen to these carriers when not only smartphones, but EVERY phone heavily relies on data service?
My advice to the carriers: build baby build. Data service is going through the roof in the next 5 years. LTE can't come soon enough.
Slashdot Mirror
We have a custom student information system built on Access and SQL server. We run it on a Terminal Server farm. This allows Mac clients to run the software, and it also allows remote access via an SSL VPN appliance. Terminal server was built for stuff like this. Many medium to large firms use terminal server to reduce end-client support costs, this also has the side effect of making the migration to Mac clients easier. -ted
In the last few years, we've replaced every single Windows laptop or desktop with a Mac. We still run windows in the server room, and terminal servers for the apps that won't run on Mac OS (Quickbooks enterprise and our student information system).
Office runs just fine on Mac OS. Yes, entourage is a crappy replacement for Outlook, but it mostly does the job. The next version of Office for Mac OS is rumored to have a feature complete version of Outlook to replace entourage.
We still take security precautions like running real-time anti-virus, using good firewalls, VLANS, and web-content filtering.
Macs can replace Windows in many common office scenarios. Terminal server can also help bridge the application gap between Windows and Mac OS.
-ted
Microsoft and Intel seem to be similar in that neither company is any good at making "consumer-grade" products.
OK, I admit, Microsoft's keyboards, mice, and Xbox are fairly consumer friendly, but that's about it.
Intel did take a crack at the consumer market for a while with USB microscopes and that stupid Intel Reader device. The verdict from those experiments was, nice try - stick with making chips and software development tools and others will build products using your stuff.
I see Microsoft slowly evolving into that - developing software and services that others use to build end-user products, similar to Intel.
-ted
A long time ago I learned that all other security comes after physical security. Without physical security, nothing else matters. Apple should remember this when giving out prototype next gen products to employees. -ted
I wasn't bullied much during school, but when I was, I returned fire 10-fold.
I was smart enough to know my physical limits, run, and fight another day.
During one bullying episode I wasn't able to win, setting the kid's backpack on fire at a bus stop got his attention. I told him next time it would be him. That crap stopped right away.
Another episode warranted stealing a bully's bike and throwing it off of a bridge onto a 6 lane highway at night.
Finally, I helped a friend return the favor to a bully by smashing his car windows, slashing his tires, and then paying a tow truck to tow his vehicle to a garage REALLY far away.
Since bullies typically don't pick a fair fight, they don't deserve a fair fight.
Every time I see an article about remote wipe, someone inevitably recommends a Faraday cage to prevent reception of a remote wipe signal.
The question is, does any mobile platform enable a "dead-man" switch, or call-home switch? The thought is that if the phone does not call home after a specified period of time, the device wipes itself.
This would seem to be an effective countermeasure against the "Faraday cage" remote wipe work-around.
It might not be effective for those that use AT&T's service though....
My 6 year old DLP set is hardly old technology, yet it does not have HDMI inputs. It only has unencrypted DVI inputs and analog inputs.
If all the unencrypted outputs are disabled, how do I connect my HDTV to the set top box?
I refuse to throw away a $4000 television because big-content has a piracy problem. I have an antenna on my roof, and it does a damn good job of getting me 40 digital channels for free. Cable companies should be very careful where they tread. The internet and an antenna satisfy almost all of my TV needs.
-ted
I worked on cars during college. I was required to buy and maintain my own tools. If I broke a tool working on a car, I was required to repair or replace the tool out of my own pocket.
I went thousands of dollars into debt before even receiving my first paycheck. This is a standard practice in many trades.
I've probably got over $20,000 in tools, that I still own, from that job - and that was a requirement to keep that job. No tools, no job.
-ted
Long ago we decided that if anyone in our company breaches security by losing an access card, or sharing a password, we would not punish the person responsible if they came forward immediately.
This policy encourages a quick resolution to the security breach. A lost security card or password can be disabled or reset thereby limiting the damage the mistake caused.
Persecuting people that make mistakes only delays the notification process, and then delays the fix - putting more people/things at risk.
People make mistakes, they happen, and there is nothing you can do to prevent them.
-ted
We dispose of our e-waste through a disposal company that certifies the destruction of all the data on the devices. We started disposing of fax machines and copiers this way when we realized that these things store potentially confidential documents.
-ted
I'd like to see them speed un-boxing heavy servers, cursing at different rail types that require access above and below the rack space allocated to you. I'd also like to see them curse when there isn't enough power outlets available in the rack space you've rented, or there aren't enough cable management systems in place to hold all the stuff that connects your gear together.
That would be much more entertaining.
-ted
Not the cheapest stuff, but Meru's access points and controllers will allow you to run all the APs on one channel, and the controller "load balances" the users across the available access points within reach of the client.
We use them at my place of employment (6 APs scattered throughout the building servicing around 200 laptops), and the performance is quite good.
-ted
Microsoft is the same company they were 20 years ago. Windows, Office, and Server software are how they make money.
Everything else under Balmer's tenure has been a (financial) failure.
Now, Balmer wants to spend the war chest to win the "search" war. I've just got one question for Steve:
Hey Steve, how much money did you make on the browser war?
This idiot wants to kill Google by spending tons of money on search, yet he has not explained how this will make Microsoft a single dime.
For Microsoft to grow and prosper in other areas, Steve Balmer needs to go.
-ted
We have around 20 servers, and the usual routing/firewall/switch/remote access stuff.
Our 16kVA Symmetra LX is 70% loaded and gives us about 30 minutes of runtime.
Total cost for the UPS and outboard step-down transformers was around $10k
-ted
The computers in my refrigerator, car, DVR, television, telephone, microwave, and assorted other appliances only let me do what they were designed to do, and nothing more.
Harmph...
The iPad is NOT a general purpose computing device. Get used to it. As computers become more integrated into our lives, they will look more like appliances.
Geez, if you want a computer, buy a computer, NOT AN APPLIANCE.
-ted
Having endured through tons of interfaces that required a stylus to properly operate, the iPhone was the first that combined a "finger friendly" environment with sleek hardware and the ability to plug into the apple ecosystem.
I lived through various early versions of Windows Mobile, Palm OS, Windows Mobile on Palm, blackberry, and Good Technology (exchange connectivity many years ago before Microsoft built it into the product).
At the time they were all great since that was the best we had. Once iPhone came out, all those other solutions felt like ancient technology.
A similar phenomenon happened with the iPod. MP3 players were around long before iPod, and they were cool, since that is all we had. Once iPod came out, all prior MP3 players looked clunky and old.
Apple has a habit of setting the bar for design, and a couple of years later, once everyone else catches up, people think that the state of the art always used to be this way. In reality, many technologies did exist before Apple did their version, but Apple has a way of raising the design standard, and forcing others to raise theirs.
-ted
I bought a $450 HP laptop for a family member this Christmas, The hardware was pretty nice for the money, but the system image HP put on the machine was appalling.
First - it's loaded with garbage, support links, trial versions, and a taskbar that has so much junk running, that fills half the width of the display.
Second - no recovery discs, or operating system installation discs what so ever. You need to "make" the discs from a supplied utility and a utility partition.
Hours later I had "de-crapified" the machine and burned her system recovery discs. After enduring that process, I can see how someone might want to pay to have this done.
What is pretty underhanded is that Best Buy appears to have no inventory that would give a buyer the ability to "opt-out" of their offering.
Apple seems to be the only major computer manufacturer that doesn't load up their systems with garbage, and they give you real OS installation discs, not system recovery discs.
-ted
I'm surprised that lots of comments here focus on the uselessness of technology in the classroom, instead of how technology does actually improve classroom instruction - on Slashdot no less.
Technology is not the "magic-bullet" for educating our youth. There is no "magic-bullet". The realization that is being generally accepted is that all students learn differently. Some more so than others. Our school teaches kids with dyslexia and mild Asperger's syndrome, and these kids, without a doubt, learn much differently than you or I. Technology helps tailor the instruction to the individual student's needs.
Many people here are extolling the virtues of pencil and paper - that's great if you can read and write, but there are tons of kids out there who have encoding/decoding language difficulties. Should these different students not learn science, math, or history due to their language problems?
Computers are an outstanding tool for these kids. They can write papers, even though they can not "hand-write" papers. They can learn mathematics without the frustration of attempting to read a math text.
The other argument for technology in the classroom: Many instructional materials, and "new knowledge" never make it to print. There are tons of videos made by REALLY GOOD teachers that can help less skilled teachers in a classroom. Sure, it would be nice to have teaching perfection in every classroom, but I can tell you first hand, there aren't enough of these perfect teachers to go around. Online video distribution does maximize the impact of these stellar teachers, and exposes kids to varying teaching styles.
Ultimately, the student, the parent, and the teacher are responsible for getting that student an education. Technology can only assist, it can't do the work.
-ted
IT guys typically don't abuse their authority. I've found, in the networks I've administered, management asks me to balance functionality with security. It's a very nebulous request, and typically it means that IT staff must use their best judgment when creating IT policies.
I've found the strictest policies are in place in financial firms, and the loosest policies are in place in education, and weirdly enough, law firms.
-ted
I was the network manager for a bank with 17 branches, and 3 office locations, about 200 or so employees, and about 40 servers (production, training, and test).
Total IT staff at the bank: 1 VP of network services (I reported to him), 1 network services manager (me), 2 help-desk/branch support guys (reported to me), 1 DBA, 1 core banking application support/administrator, 1 IT dept secretary (actually VP's secretary, but she helped us all out), and 2 operators to run the check processing/statement printing systems.
Now I am the IT director for a small private school. We have one school and one office/tutoring center, about 70 employees and 128 students, 20 servers, and a bit over 200 laptops and desktops, as well as other stuff (routers, switches, firewalls, remote access, VOIP telephones, printers, copiers, IP cameras, AV gear....etc)
Total IT staff at the school: 1 IT director, and two technology teachers. The teachers are in the classroom most of the day, but they help students and staff with the "help-desk" stuff, and escalate severe problems to me. Administrators come directly to me for support.
-ted
I have never been prevented from paying full price for the hardware from any carrier. This allows me to go month to month on the service.
I also do this with sattelite TV companies, and I've noticed they treat me better when I am not contractually bound to their service.
Telecom contracts are for suckers.
-Ted
We use Postini, and postini handles the delivery of our mail. We have yet to have any organization block our mail while it is delivered by postini. It seems that most mail admins implicitly trust that postini's servers aren't spewing spam.
As far as postini's position on using SPF to identify spam:
Postini has investigated SPF and has decided not to implement it as a
feature for inbound mail processing. Implementing SPF would add
significant processing overhead without adding any appreciable
effectiveness to the spam filtering. Almost all mail that would be
blocked by SPF are also identified as spam by our spam filters.
In addition, Postini tracks the IP addresses of Fortune 500
corporations and the most popular internet sites such as Yahoo,
Hotmail, eBay, etc. Adding these domains to the Approved Senders list,
particularly at the organization level, is not usually needed and can
result in spam appearing to be sent from those domains inadvertently
getting to users' mailboxes. For this reason, Postini recommends
against using the Approved Senders list in this way; rather, it should
be used only for mail from senders that has previously been falsely
quarantined as spam.
The other reason I have not published and SPF record: Verizon is hosting our DNS services, and when I asked their business services about adding SPF records to my domain the guy on the other end of the telephone had NO idea what I was talking about.
After 3 or 4 call transfers I just gave up.
-ted
Hacking makes systems more resistant and secure over time. It's a lot like biological systems that develop immunity to infection over time.
Satellite TV is remarkably resistant to hacking and theft due to its long and tumultuous evolution driven by hackers.
Hopefully military communications will evolve as fast now that the rest of the world is becoming technologically adept.
-ted
"It was a watershed moment when I realized getting an 8-megapixel Canon camera was cheaper than buying a bunch of textbooks."
There in lies the real problem. Textbooks are too damn expensive and have been for many years.
-ted
The iPhone has opened the data usage floodgates, and those gates will never be closed again. The horse is out of the barn, the toothpaste is out of the tube.
EVERY smartphone from now on will be a heavy data usage device. Droid is the next data heavy product. Heavy data use is the new "normal".
What will happen to these carriers when not only smartphones, but EVERY phone heavily relies on data service?
My advice to the carriers: build baby build. Data service is going through the roof in the next 5 years. LTE can't come soon enough.
-ted