We're currently working on a contract for the Olympics. The olympics delivery authority is currently holding bidding for a job, and has spent months choosing a provider, but they've demanded that once they choose a provider, the system is ready in two weeks. That schedule is not possible. As a result, we've already done the job, and the other bidders must have either done the same or are planning to just not meet the contractual dates.
This is also likely to mean that the actual cost will include costs associated with unsucessful bids the "winner" may have made in the past. Possibly also unsucessful bids they make in the future. Consider also that the actual bidding process can itself be very expensive, 7 figure sums (including the bribes which are almost inevitable when this kind of money is involved), thus potentially excluding many companies who may be able to actually do the job in question. It's possible that in this case bidders may gamble that winning the bid will trump not being able to meet the date... It probably depends on the costs of actually building the system relate to the costs of the paperwork of the bidding process. If the former is a few hundred thousand pounds or less then it probably dosn't make much difference to the several million the latter is likely to involve.
The two key problems were (1) reliability - that is, downtime or the service becoming unusably slow at peak times was a regular occurrence; and (2) quota size - quotas were not big enough to store a year's e-mails.
Both of these could be due to the hardware being underspeced.
Back in MY day, if you wanted a school email account, you went to the lab underneath the library and tried to get the alpha geek's attention. If he found your manner pleasing, and if your papers were in order, you might get a VAX account.
Or, he might turn you into a newt. You took your chances.
It's kind of sad today, now that the magic is gone.
Just as well really. If I a working wand I'd have to change the sign on the door to "Sys Admin and Amphibian Keeper". Maybe have it change to "Amphibian Keeper and Sys Admin" when I was busy or annoyed:)
Having this stuff on site is a major expense and really unnecessary for a college.
Having stuff off site also costs money. It also has other issues such as external bandwidth, administration, control, data protection, etc.
Some people just want to get work done not play with the hardware and software. I use Google for my small business and it works just fine.
AFAIK there is no overlap in side between the largest of small businesses and the smallest of universities. We are talking somewhere between several hundred and several thousand people. With a change of membership at least every year.
If you don't want to have to hire three guys for tech support and one guy to configure and support the hardware (or be cheap and have the three tech support guys do double duty)
That might be enough people for a small insitution, just farm it out to either a local IT shop or Google or Yahoo,
What do these people know about educational usage. Whilst sizewise you have "enterprise size" systems there are often important differences in how things need to be done. e.g. being able to group students. AFAIK the corporate world dosn't tend to have the concept of "timetables", etc.
Allot of Uni's use addresses such as 370245@student.uni.edu so the address its self doesn't normally give much away.
It also makes it harder for spammers to use dictionary methods to create email addresses and makes it rather obvious when a spammer is trying to do this:)
Agreed outside of saving the mail logs and bodies. This is a college, not a corporation. At mine, they preferred to log nothing to avoid getting pulled into legal disputes. AFAIK, it isn't required by law, so it's all headaches for no gain on their part.
Since the original poster gave no clue as to where in the world the University in question was there is no possible way to know what laws would be applicable. Though Universities typically do have a "legal personhood" akin to that of "corporate persons".
The questioner didn't even specify whether the software was running on their own servers or on Yagoosoft's servers (I'm guessing the latter, since I haven't heard of a yahoo on-site solution). In the end, only you know what's most important to the university and, therefore, the things you need to ask about.
There are also probably questions they need to ask the network admins, in terms of external connectivity. These people may have questions about the bandwidth requirements of externally hosted email. Especially if this involves some sort of web based interface. Since it's possible for two pieces of HTML to render in the same way even though one is several times the size of the other.
And if you have a half decent PBX you can have that anyway without requiring the Exchange integration anyway.
I'm aware of a university which provided telephones to it's student residences. However this wasn't through a Private Branch eXchange but through Private Telephone Network (with multiple PSTN interconnects). I'm aware of a different university which had a centrex type system for student residences interconnected with a large PBX which served the university campus. Both of these systems were in place 20 years ago, pre Microsoft Exchange. When it comes to universities and telephone systems several thousand physical extensions can be your starting point. Even if you want to call it a "PBX" something like an AXE 10 or DMS 100 is likely to be required. If the university went for a centrex system the PSTN would probably want to put hardware on site since thousands of copper pairs take up more duct space than a fibre trunk.
Unfortunatly the original poster provides no information about their "legacy mail system" or why it dosn't fit their needs. As well as any indication as to what needs it dosn't fit.
There is also no information about the entity itself or where it is. Since all of their potential outsourcees are US based companies it does actually matter what country they are in. If they are in the US it isn't an issue (legally speaking), if they are in the EU then what they are planning is almost certainly illegal, elsewhere they'd need to check with their national government first. Outsourcing is always going to be a risky activity. That risk is greater when outsourcing to an entity larger than you (try and sue them and they'll laugh at you) and when they are in a different country.
I think the main problem with putting telescopes on the moon is getting them there.
Especially something the size of picture in the article... Which looks big enough to fit every Apollo command, service and lunar modules ever launched inside:)
Because for close to half the time the far side of the moon is completely blinded because it is looking towards the sun.
Actually it's nowhere near that bad. Telescopes typically have a narrow field of view so no problem so long as you don't point it at the Sun. (Unless the telescope is part of a Solar observatory.) The reason for putting it on farside is that you only have the Sun as a troublesome bright object. On nearside you still have the Sun (half of the time) but you also have the Earth, which blocks out a lot more of the sky too.
"It would be very expensive to maintain a cable or laser hookup for any significant distance along the moon surface." Why? You don't have weather and what not to deal with so I would have thought it would be easier than on earth.
There is a huge temperature variation between Lunar day and night. One effect of the Earth having a dense atmosphere is that day and night don't vary that much in temperature...
I'm betting that if a system is going to catch any decent percentage of terrorists (greater than 50%) the false positive rate will be above 1%.
There's also the issue that often governments are only interested in a fairly small subset of terrorists in the first place. A system capable of catching anything like 50% would undoubtedly pick up some any given government didn't care about as well as some that government actually supported.
What idiot would let the people on that list (if they were really a threat) into a terminal? Wouldn't you expect them to STOP them BEFORE they get into a position to do that kind of damage?
If they really were any kind of threat you'd expect them to be at least under house arrest. Real terrorists aren't as obsessed with aviation as those supposedly preventing terrorism are.
We're still going to get stupid hassles from the TSA, we're still going to get the watch list filled with pointless entries based on the name of someone who might have been seen with someone who was linked to someone who claimed to have been involved in a shooting in North Ireland.
Most people on the list probably don't even have this close a connection with an actual terrorist.
It really all relates to political appointees, those who get their positions purely as a result of which political candidate they supported not on their skills and qualifications.
It's not quite that simple. Since such people also include the relatives of such "political candidates" and those of their supporters.
Note these exact same things happen in corporations, where corrupt executives will promote their criminal accomplices in the corporation as they go higher up the corporate ladder, as well as of course the inevitable nepotistic placements, who else will employee the pretty but stupid spawn. So it is most definately not a government problem but, typical in most industries.
Large corporations and industries often have their own politics. Where you have an industry which is closely connected with government(s) you might end up with different politics interacting in complex ways.
Giving the crew members stun guns (probably don't want real guns in such a crowded place) would have improved security.
You might be better off with real guns. The worst damage you can do to a plane with one is to make a small hole somewhere you can't plug in flight. Whereas high voltage electricity does not tend to mix well with complex electronics. It might not be a bad idea to train all flight attendants in martial arts. Since this is also applicable to dealing with the far more common situation of "drunk and disordely" passengers.
Keeping a list of who is allowed to travel does not improve security,
Especially where it's unclear exactly why people are put on such a list.
At least for consumer hardware we have come to expect that it cannot be damaged by buggy software, but in general it is not true that hardware should always protect itself against bad software. Just consider much of embedded software, e.g. the flight software for aeroplanes.
Hence you'd never upgrade the firmware on all the redundant computers on an airliner at the same time. Typically with there being a minimum time (both by the calender and flying) between such upgrades.
ATA's wire protocol uses a hardware abstraction over block storage devices, as does USB Mass Storage Class. The hard disk is emulating an ideal block device, and the SSD is also emulating an ideal block device.
This has been the case for a long time. Even with parallel IDE the drive geometry reported by the controller was typically a complete fiction. Another common feature is the ability for the drive controller to transparently remap failed blocks. Which means that by the time the host actually starts seeing failures the disk is likely to be in a very bad state.
And, of course, flashing the EEPROM on a NIC should be a rare event. Nice strawman, though.
Doing any kind of firmware upgrade should be a rare event. At minimum it should involve first shutting down the driver accessing that piece of hardware. If the peripheral is designed sensibly an "upgrade firmware" command would require some kind of "handshake" and only be accepted as the first command after a reset.
think the main mechanism for aging is slow oxidation. Therefore aging in a bottle only happens due to air moving through a cork. This is enough to subtly change the character of some wines;
There are also wines which are intended to be drunk "young". Presumably if these were aged the result would be less drinkable.
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We're currently working on a contract for the Olympics. The olympics delivery authority is currently holding bidding for a job, and has spent months choosing a provider, but they've demanded that once they choose a provider, the system is ready in two weeks. That schedule is not possible. As a result, we've already done the job, and the other bidders must have either done the same or are planning to just not meet the contractual dates.
This is also likely to mean that the actual cost will include costs associated with unsucessful bids the "winner" may have made in the past. Possibly also unsucessful bids they make in the future.
Consider also that the actual bidding process can itself be very expensive, 7 figure sums (including the bribes which are almost inevitable when this kind of money is involved), thus potentially excluding many companies who may be able to actually do the job in question.
It's possible that in this case bidders may gamble that winning the bid will trump not being able to meet the date... It probably depends on the costs of actually building the system relate to the costs of the paperwork of the bidding process. If the former is a few hundred thousand pounds or less then it probably dosn't make much difference to the several million the latter is likely to involve.
The two key problems were (1) reliability - that is, downtime or the service becoming unusably slow at peak times was a regular occurrence; and (2) quota size - quotas were not big enough to store a year's e-mails.
Both of these could be due to the hardware being underspeced.
Google has a privacy policy and the lawyers tell us it meets the requirements.
Most likely it meets the requirements of being a statement of policy. As regards actual privacy or security "privacy policies" mean nothing.
Back in MY day, if you wanted a school email account, you went to the lab underneath the library and tried to get the alpha geek's attention. If he found your manner pleasing, and if your papers were in order, you might get a VAX account.
:)
Or, he might turn you into a newt. You took your chances.
It's kind of sad today, now that the magic is gone.
Just as well really. If I a working wand I'd have to change the sign on the door to "Sys Admin and Amphibian Keeper". Maybe have it change to "Amphibian Keeper and Sys Admin" when I was busy or annoyed
Having this stuff on site is a major expense and really unnecessary for a college.
Having stuff off site also costs money. It also has other issues such as external bandwidth, administration, control, data protection, etc.
Some people just want to get work done not play with the hardware and software. I use Google for my small business and it works just fine.
AFAIK there is no overlap in side between the largest of small businesses and the smallest of universities. We are talking somewhere between several hundred and several thousand people. With a change of membership at least every year.
If you don't want to have to hire three guys for tech support and one guy to configure and support the hardware (or be cheap and have the three tech support guys do double duty)
That might be enough people for a small insitution,
just farm it out to either a local IT shop or Google or Yahoo,
What do these people know about educational usage. Whilst sizewise you have "enterprise size" systems there are often important differences in how things need to be done. e.g. being able to group students. AFAIK the corporate world dosn't tend to have the concept of "timetables", etc.
Allot of Uni's use addresses such as 370245@student.uni.edu so the address its self doesn't normally give much away.
:)
It also makes it harder for spammers to use dictionary methods to create email addresses and makes it rather obvious when a spammer is trying to do this
Agreed outside of saving the mail logs and bodies. This is a college, not a corporation. At mine, they preferred to log nothing to avoid getting pulled into legal disputes. AFAIK, it isn't required by law, so it's all headaches for no gain on their part.
Since the original poster gave no clue as to where in the world the University in question was there is no possible way to know what laws would be applicable. Though Universities typically do have a "legal personhood" akin to that of "corporate persons".
The questioner didn't even specify whether the software was running on their own servers or on Yagoosoft's servers (I'm guessing the latter, since I haven't heard of a yahoo on-site solution). In the end, only you know what's most important to the university and, therefore, the things you need to ask about.
There are also probably questions they need to ask the network admins, in terms of external connectivity. These people may have questions about the bandwidth requirements of externally hosted email. Especially if this involves some sort of web based interface. Since it's possible for two pieces of HTML to render in the same way even though one is several times the size of the other.
And if you have a half decent PBX you can have that anyway without requiring the Exchange integration anyway.
I'm aware of a university which provided telephones to it's student residences. However this wasn't through a Private Branch eXchange but through Private Telephone Network (with multiple PSTN interconnects). I'm aware of a different university which had a centrex type system for student residences interconnected with a large PBX which served the university campus. Both of these systems were in place 20 years ago, pre Microsoft Exchange.
When it comes to universities and telephone systems several thousand physical extensions can be your starting point. Even if you want to call it a "PBX" something like an AXE 10 or DMS 100 is likely to be required. If the university went for a centrex system the PSTN would probably want to put hardware on site since thousands of copper pairs take up more duct space than a fibre trunk.
Being able to check your email by calling your voice mail extension from anywhere is pretty damned nice.
:)
But irrelevent if the vast majority of university students don't have indivual (or any) voicemail extensions
Unfortunatly the original poster provides no information about their "legacy mail system" or why it dosn't fit their needs. As well as any indication as to what needs it dosn't fit. There is also no information about the entity itself or where it is. Since all of their potential outsourcees are US based companies it does actually matter what country they are in. If they are in the US it isn't an issue (legally speaking), if they are in the EU then what they are planning is almost certainly illegal, elsewhere they'd need to check with their national government first.
Outsourcing is always going to be a risky activity. That risk is greater when outsourcing to an entity larger than you (try and sue them and they'll laugh at you) and when they are in a different country.
I think the main problem with putting telescopes on the moon is getting them there.
:)
Especially something the size of picture in the article... Which looks big enough to fit every Apollo command, service and lunar modules ever launched inside
Because for close to half the time the far side of the moon is completely blinded because it is looking towards the sun.
Actually it's nowhere near that bad. Telescopes typically have a narrow field of view so no problem so long as you don't point it at the Sun. (Unless the telescope is part of a Solar observatory.)
The reason for putting it on farside is that you only have the Sun as a troublesome bright object. On nearside you still have the Sun (half of the time) but you also have the Earth, which blocks out a lot more of the sky too.
"It would be very expensive to maintain a cable or laser hookup for any significant distance along the moon surface."
Why? You don't have weather and what not to deal with so I would have thought it would be easier than on earth.
There is a huge temperature variation between Lunar day and night. One effect of the Earth having a dense atmosphere is that day and night don't vary that much in temperature...
I'm betting that if a system is going to catch any decent percentage of terrorists (greater than 50%) the false positive rate will be above 1%.
There's also the issue that often governments are only interested in a fairly small subset of terrorists in the first place. A system capable of catching anything like 50% would undoubtedly pick up some any given government didn't care about as well as some that government actually supported.
What idiot would let the people on that list (if they were really a threat) into a terminal? Wouldn't you expect them to STOP them BEFORE they get into a position to do that kind of damage?
If they really were any kind of threat you'd expect them to be at least under house arrest. Real terrorists aren't as obsessed with aviation as those supposedly preventing terrorism are.
We're still going to get stupid hassles from the TSA, we're still going to get the watch list filled with pointless entries based on the name of someone who might have been seen with someone who was linked to someone who claimed to have been involved in a shooting in North Ireland.
Most people on the list probably don't even have this close a connection with an actual terrorist.
It really all relates to political appointees, those who get their positions purely as a result of which political candidate they supported not on their skills and qualifications.
It's not quite that simple. Since such people also include the relatives of such "political candidates" and those of their supporters.
Note these exact same things happen in corporations, where corrupt executives will promote their criminal accomplices in the corporation as they go higher up the corporate ladder, as well as of course the inevitable nepotistic placements, who else will employee the pretty but stupid spawn. So it is most definately not a government problem but, typical in most industries.
Large corporations and industries often have their own politics. Where you have an industry which is closely connected with government(s) you might end up with different politics interacting in complex ways.
For beef, is the answer cow, cows, cattle, ox...
As well as multiple word answers such as "Domestic Cattle", "Bos taurus", etc.
Giving the crew members stun guns (probably don't want real guns in such a crowded place) would have improved security.
You might be better off with real guns. The worst damage you can do to a plane with one is to make a small hole somewhere you can't plug in flight. Whereas high voltage electricity does not tend to mix well with complex electronics.
It might not be a bad idea to train all flight attendants in martial arts. Since this is also applicable to dealing with the far more common situation of "drunk and disordely" passengers.
Keeping a list of who is allowed to travel does not improve security,
Especially where it's unclear exactly why people are put on such a list.
At least for consumer hardware we have come to expect that it cannot be damaged by buggy software, but in general it is not true that hardware should always protect itself against bad software. Just consider much of embedded software, e.g. the flight software for aeroplanes.
Hence you'd never upgrade the firmware on all the redundant computers on an airliner at the same time. Typically with there being a minimum time (both by the calender and flying) between such upgrades.
ATA's wire protocol uses a hardware abstraction over block storage devices, as does USB Mass Storage Class. The hard disk is emulating an ideal block device, and the SSD is also emulating an ideal block device.
This has been the case for a long time. Even with parallel IDE the drive geometry reported by the controller was typically a complete fiction. Another common feature is the ability for the drive controller to transparently remap failed blocks. Which means that by the time the host actually starts seeing failures the disk is likely to be in a very bad state.
And, of course, flashing the EEPROM on a NIC should be a rare event. Nice strawman, though.
Doing any kind of firmware upgrade should be a rare event. At minimum it should involve first shutting down the driver accessing that piece of hardware. If the peripheral is designed sensibly an "upgrade firmware" command would require some kind of "handshake" and only be accepted as the first command after a reset.
Scotch is aged in used oak casks which they buy mainly from American bourbon makers.
They can also use Sherry casks. It's a bit surprising if it is actually cheaper to get casks from North America than Spain though
think the main mechanism for aging is slow oxidation. Therefore aging in a bottle only happens due to air moving through a cork. This is enough to subtly change the character of some wines;
There are also wines which are intended to be drunk "young". Presumably if these were aged the result would be less drinkable.