This is a school district, it practically shuts down after 5-6pm in the evening, and generally any network intensive activity shuts down by 4pm.
... and the IT people were forbidden by school policy to push out a modification that would automatically turn the machines off at 6pm.
There is absolutely no reason to have that rat's nest there, or to not have an accurate inventory of the network,
Bullshit! You need a budget and you need authorization. Without both of those, you end up with a rats nest. Same as telephone systems from Ma Bell. Same as anywhere else.
but rolls of Cat5e are cheap
... but proper cable management isn't. AND it's hard to explain to bosses why it's needed. "Can't you just plug it in?"
He also apparently made firewall exceptions for SETI@Home on 5,000+ machines across the district
OMG BLOCK PORT 80 (http) AND PORT 443 (https/ssl) NOW!
It wasn't until SETI@home began interfering with the teacher's ability to teach that anybody actually investigated this guy
It wasn't until right before the school board elections that the board member pushed this. The hardware problems with the white boards have been covered elsewhere on slashdot - they're not unique to this school. Teachers complained about being given the hardware and no training beyond "Here's the install cd. Good luck."
He's being fired and brought up on criminal ethics charges because his unethical and incompetant (sic) behavior is going to cost the school district upwards of $2 million to fix.
The $2 million is for updating hardware and a new secure building - infrastructure improvements - NOT to "fix his unethical and incompetant (sic) behavior"
Removing SETI@home from 5,000 machines will cost in the neighborhood of $50,000-$100,000,
... because it costs between $10 and $20 per computer to click "uninstall"... (or to push out an update that removes it from all the computers)... good thing you're still in your mom's basement instead of working in the biz.
The rest of it is cabling, inventory, and infrastructure costs which this guy should have been making sure got done on an incrimental (sic) basis, mitigating the costs.
No, it's stuff that his BOSS should have been doing - the same board member who is now making him the fall guy.
Go work in any place that actually has budget constraints and their main job isn't IT, and you'll see the same rats nests of cables, etc. Go work in ANY job with more than half-a-dozen people, and you'll see the same office politics.
Perhaps you need to get some reading comprehension skills.
They are estimating close to $2 million to fix all the problems this guy caused,
Nope - they estimate that for fixing the problems with the network, etc., that have accumulated over a decade of lack of funds, etc. This includes things like a secure building for the servers. Certainly not his fault.
The "downloading porn" is an unproven allegation. If we were to fire every admin who's ever downloaded something that a prude would consider "porn" (like accidentally clicking on a goatguy or tubgirl link), there'd be no admins left.
figure removing SETI@home alone will cost at least $50,000, and if they are contracting the work out (they will probably have to) it will cost more like $100,000-$150,000 because of project overhead and profit markup for the consultant.
$10 to $30 per computer to click the "uninstall" button? I don't think so, Clyde.
The very article you linked to says that it was SETI@home that tipped them off, because it almost imediately severely impacted their system.
Those whiteboards have been reported elsewhere to have deployment problems - it has nothing to do with seti@home, and yu'd have known that if you had a clue. It also certainly didn't "immediately impart their system" if it's been running for almost a decade.
As for the rest - "taking computer equipment home" is often done with obsolete systems or "parts boxes", the "increased network usage" is 150 tb over 10 years, which sounds like a lot, but is really 41 gigs a day or less than 10 meg per box a day - incidental traffic (think 10-20 slashdot pages - heck, I've done 400 gigs in one month on a single box at home without breaking a sweat) - that wouldn't interfere with normal network usage in a system capable of supporting 5,000 computers. As for the "punching holes in the firewall" - you might want to read this and this - do you have a problem with ports 80 (http) and 443 (https/ssl) being "open"?
He apparently compromised the security of the entire network just to run this app, if that doesn't scream unethical and incompetant to you, then I don't think anything will.
Riiight - having ports open so that users can surf the web is a terrible thing - quick - block ports 80 and 443 on your machine! It's a security risk!
Gee, it seems rather odd to me that all of the blame is being placed on one person when Brad was clearly told that he was not in charge earlier this year when David Lignon, (who happens to be partially related to Dr. Birdwell) was put in charge of the entire IT dept and all of Brads team were basically told not to ask questions but do what was told of them. This is just a small example of how things are run around there.
The problems in the classroom with computers or not being able to enter grades could have alot to do with the fact that they keep changing systems and the person that used to assist the teachers was forced to leave as well this year. How about the fact that most of the IT department walked out earlier this year???? Yep, blame it all on one person, that seems to be easier than just fixing the problems in the district.
Dr. Birdwell, do you ever take blame for ANYTHING? You are not the only one living a nightmare, the entire staff (past, present) as well as the parents and most important, the students have lived a nightmare for the last 4 years as well. You had an opportunity to jump ship and go to Wyoming last year and ASKED to stay here for stability. THe only ones that seem to have stability are yourself and your posse of friends and family YOU have brought on board. Instead of pointing fingers, take a long hard look in the mirror and ask if YOU have made a positive difference.
... and...
0xym0r0n wrote:
higleyknight09: 'A school computer should be used 8 hours a day for 183 days. Not 24 hours a day for 365 day that is six times more than normal. Of course computers would eventually fail.'
Hate to burst your bubble, but computers will always fail. Not to mention that there is even the argument that turning PC's off causes more damage than letting them run 24/7, mostly when talking about the hard drives. If the district wanted PC's that wouldn't fail they certainly shouldn't have gone with laptops.
They would also not spend an alleged $15,000 in consulting services to find out what could easily be told to them by their own tech department. Which I would also have to say that, that figure alone seems shady to me.
Your other assumption is that the shutdown button is removed via the image and that this was done intentionally by Mr. Niesluchowski in order to run SETI 24/7, possible yes... but impossible to prove. There are other things that need to be done, such as staff connecting remotely to fix issues, updates that can be pushed, ect ect. However, the shutdown option being removed is not a result of the image yet a policy set against users.
It's unfortunate that the majority of posts I read simply follow the assumptions made by such horrid reporting skills and like a mindless drone, babble on and on about how bad this guy is. I mean, it's not like teachers install unapproved software that plagues half the district with unseen malware and viruses... oh but I guess the loses estimated by that would never even be considered by people so eager to jump down the throats of others.
The analysis of these findings of coarse will never be displayed, being that the true energy driven cost of damages would be a simple calculation of the cost per computer would be total watt usage - usage of standard pc in the same environment. As opposed to the method that probably was used, which was amount of watts used during non-school hours(estimated to the worst degree).
The biggest thing though, that none of you know is, did he have permission to deploy said software at one point in time? Or that he had permission to have hardware at his place of residence. See, it's so easy to read a column in a newspaper and say 'Wow! That guy needs to be put away.'. So continue to post on this topic, yet.. you have higley in your name an
Some of those computers date back to 2000 - sleep mode?
Also, as comments in this article point out, the techs were forbidden from rolling out a script that would have turned the computers off at night, as it was against school policy.
Read the comments - some are from people who worked there, some from people who live there. It looks more like the guy was fired because someone - Superintendent Denise Birdwell - wanted to polish her image.
From the comments in this article (thanks to this post) from people who are there, it sounds like a real hatchet job.
Salient points:
The computers were configured to run 24/7 by school policy. A previous attempt to get them to run only from 6am to 6pm was met with "you're not allowed to do that" by the school board, even though it was explained that it would save $90k per annum in electricity.
The $$$ quoted are to fix the infrastructure problems - including needing a new building - not the "damage" that was done.
The photo supposedly showing "bad cable management" is abut what you'd expect - it's not like schools are going to make spending money on cable management and wiring closets a high priority - this is what happens to systems that grow over the period of a decade with management saying "here's some more stuff - make it work" rather than "here's the funds and the plan on how we want this rolled out over the long term". So yes, they now say they're going to need a couple of hundred dollars a computer to "fix" a decades' worth of "just make it work".
Other staff have quit or been forced out
The timing of all this seems to have been motivated more by school district politics than anything else
Charging $40 to see an article that used to be free nd that is frequently outdated, obsolete, or inaccurate is really pushing the limits, as in "This paywall tax is taxing my patience."
It's also a "tax on stupidity", same as lotteries, not only because it encourages the use of outdated materials subjected to less review by outsiders, but also because it extracts a fee from those who do not know how to find the free version of many of the articles.
Are you sure your university doesn't give you a login to use to access journals off-campus?
The paywalled articles are often stuff that was available free before the paywall went up. Also, since they're behind a paywall, people assume that they're actually more authoritative ("they must be worth more if you have to pay for them"), but often, because they are now behind paywalls, they're subject to less critical review (and in many cases are just plain out-of-date or even wrong).
The paywall won't be around in a decade or so - after all, as a researcher, you want both "street cred" and tenure, and that means that the more your articles are cited, the better - articles behind a paywall won't get cited as much, so it will eventually be seen as a bad career move.
It's a cookie. Then again, what's to stop people from downloading simplepie and making their own "news service", so that they don't have any contact with google whatsoever, so no google cookies, no google url data, no google referrer, etc.
I played around with it a year ago - a bit of work and you can have your own customized NotGoogleNews news crawler. Or set up multiple instances on multiple urls, and have notgooglenews.com/world, notgooglenews.com/, notgooglenews.com/us, notgooglenews.com/sports, notgooglenews.com/entertainment, notgooglenews.com/scitech, notgooglenews.com/business, notgooglenews.com/health - then scrape your individual feeds for the "front page".
Craigslist are doing fine without you, me and yahoo.
... but they certainly like google - they let google crawl them.
The guy just has to do a scrape of the cache from the results of a google query of "site:craigslist.org" - it returns results from iowa, hawaii, san francisco, manila, singapore...
Or scrape each cached result of a query based on each geographical area: "site:kansascity.craigslist.org", "site:losangeles.craigslist.org", etc.
Never need to hit the actual craigslist domain at all.
When desktop computing got its start a good machine cost about $3,500,
Let me fix that for you...
When desktop computing got its start a turdle machine cost about $3,500, and a good one was double that. (And the definition of "good" was something that today you'd be ashamed to have sitting in your garbage can on collection day).
They should also get rid of those "news crawler" tickers along the bottom of tv shots. Put the text up a line at a time and we'll read the at our own speed.
Or how about 2 feeds - one with the stupid crawlers, and one without.
Or maybe if I fiddle with my remote, there's a custom setting so I can stretch the screen enough to hide it.
Unfortunately, I can't pretend I don't know my birth date.
[_] "I was adopted, you ignorant clod!" (and watch them go "Oh...")
[_] I was born February 29th so I only have a sign every 4th year.
[_] What sign was I born under? Yellow Cab | Maternity Ward | Abortion Clinic ("I was a screw-up even back then")
... or if you really want to scare them off...
[_] What's my sign? Well, I was born a [insert bogus info] and I was born again in [insert month] so now I'm really a [insert bogus info], so let me tell you all about Jeebus so you too can have two birthdays!
It's been great for National Unity - some of us can remember life before Toronto replaced Brian (Bullwinkle) Mulroney as the one thing the rest of the country can hate (who had replaced "and God Damn the CPR!").
If you lived in Ottawa, like I do, you'd understand that we're nearly the most absurdly "politically correct" place on earth. This is reflected by a common effort to be "inclusive" to other schools of thought. Also, there are more complainers and "letter writers" in Ottawa than any other city on Earth. I'm sure, so none of this seems out of the ordinary to me.
It's still stupid, and as a Canadian I'm just glad that I live in Quebec and we run our program separately. english version.... though someone should tell them the blink tag is dead!
In too many cases, the questions are along the lines of "I don't feel like doing my homework" or stuff like that. Or questions that could have been answered with the first search result from the text of the question itself. Or they're really slashvertisements. That's why many of these go off-topic; once 20 people have posted "justfuckinggoogleforit", ther's not much more on-topic.
In this case, the poster was either looking for absolution or wanted to brag a bit.
Now, as to doing away with "Ask Slashdot" - why not Ask Slashdot?
Personally, I have no problem with it, but then again, I have no problem with idle.slashdot.org either, so you can be excused for thinking I might be slightly brain-damaged.
Seriously, what is it with people not knowing right from wrong, or accepting responsibility for their own decisions? You're the one who has to sleep with whatever decision you make - why try to foist the blame on someone else if you decide wrong?
That's like one guy who said "My best friends' girlfriend wants to sleep with me - should I do it so I can show him what a sl*t she is?" If you're asking, it's because you want to do it and be able to say "don't blame me - everyone said it was okay !"
BTW - Good luck with whatever you decide, but a lot of us have been in the position of being able to do a lot worse, or been offered $$$ to do a lot worse, and you should be thankful we didn't have to get the group-think thing going before refusing.
Bah, Java is passé. We do everything in Logo nowadays.
PUT:page ON TURTLE
SEND TURTLE ON NETWORK
Go turtle ! You can do it !
Different tools for different jobs. For example, the USPS mandates the use of the System Networked Architecture Instructional Language for USPS mail servers.
"Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night shall stay these servers from the swift completion of their appointed tasklists".
Murdoch's point is that google is benefiting from it. They may not be benefiting directly (earning money from ads) but it certainly makes helps promote the google brand.
What I don't get is why Murdoch doesn't just start up his own distributed search engine specializing ONLY in news (or make a deal with someone to do the same), get everyone else on board, buy the news.com domain name from cnet, and drop all three indexes.
It's the same gouging as pay-as-you-go cell plans for people who can't get a cell phone on a contract.
It's the same gouging as the credit card companies are doing with their across-the-board rate raises even for customers who have always been up-to-date.
No when you're using ChromeOS the way google describes it deployed on the ARM-based netbooks... everything climatologically signed, and no unauthorized software, no local applications, not even an installed print driver; if the netbook detects tampering, it re-images itself "from the cloud."
That's a feature. It's supposed to make you feel safe.
From what I understand, it'll be possible to disable the check, with a "developer switch". After all, Google wants outside help with its open source OS. I can't find a source to cite right now, but why assume the worst?
Google has been very heavily into creating NEW ideas as well as being VERY consumer friendly
Really?
"Very consumer friendly" - tell that to the dissidents who got outed.
"NEW ideas" - like?
Free email? Nope. Plenty of others before them.
Phone calls over the internet? Even skype doesn't claim it was their idea.
Web-based apps? Nope - plenty of prior art going back to the spreadsheet applet in the Java demos.
Maps? Nope.
Indexing stuff? Nope.
Phoe operating system? Nope.
Payment services? Nope.
Affiliate advertising? Nope.
Google is an advertising company. You are their market research subject material. Their products are the alien anal probe. (okay - that last is an exaggeration - for now).
I personally don't mind ads, especially Google's ads (which are apparently far more effective than the ugly banner ads).
Google also syndicates those ugly banner ads. I specifically uninstalled adblock so I could keep an eye on all the scams my friend were sending me emails about ("look at this great opportunity", etc), and a LOT of them are from google. Including banners here on slashdot for "I got a government check for $INSERT_TENS_OF_THOUSANDS_OF_DOLLARS" scams.
Hell for the folks who hate the ads in Gmail and Hotmail, you can pay a premium to remove them for less than a paid email account cost 10 years ago.
And I can get a computer for A LOT LESS than what a dvd burner cost 10 years ago. So what? I can store a terabyte of data on my local hard disk for less than the cost of a modem a decade ago. And if that data happens to be my email, I can search it locally, which is a lot better than trusting it to google (and I can back up 16 gigs of email on a $25 usb stick).
Some people will be happy letting google or microsoft or apple run their lives - for the rest of us, there are alternatives. You get what you pay for.
Dan Lyons is shocked, shocked that Yahoo's PR team lied to him about how long CEO Jerry Yang would stay in the job. PR people routinely lie; it's part of the job description. But the good ones don't get caught. Lyons, Newsweek's tech columnist, interviewed Yahoo chairman Roy Bostock less than a month before Monday's announcement that Yang would step down, and Bostock loudly declared Yang was here to stay. One would think no one would be more cynical about the world of tech PR than the man who savaged Apple's spinmeister when he impersonated CEO Steve Jobs in a satirical blog.
The guy is scum. He also has no clue when it comes to the inner workings of technology (sort of like a lot of the "analysts" that you see getting it wrong all the time).
Slashdot Mirror
Bullshit! You need a budget and you need authorization. Without both of those, you end up with a rats nest. Same as telephone systems from Ma Bell. Same as anywhere else.
OMG BLOCK PORT 80 (http) AND PORT 443 (https/ssl) NOW!
It wasn't until right before the school board elections that the board member pushed this. The hardware problems with the white boards have been covered elsewhere on slashdot - they're not unique to this school. Teachers complained about being given the hardware and no training beyond "Here's the install cd. Good luck."
The $2 million is for updating hardware and a new secure building - infrastructure improvements - NOT to "fix his unethical and incompetant (sic) behavior"
Perhaps you need to get some reading comprehension skills.
Nope - they estimate that for fixing the problems with the network, etc., that have accumulated over a decade of lack of funds, etc. This includes things like a secure building for the servers. Certainly not his fault.
The "downloading porn" is an unproven allegation. If we were to fire every admin who's ever downloaded something that a prude would consider "porn" (like accidentally clicking on a goatguy or tubgirl link), there'd be no admins left.
$10 to $30 per computer to click the "uninstall" button? I don't think so, Clyde.
Those whiteboards have been reported elsewhere to have deployment problems - it has nothing to do with seti@home, and yu'd have known that if you had a clue. It also certainly didn't "immediately impart their system" if it's been running for almost a decade.
As for the rest - "taking computer equipment home" is often done with obsolete systems or "parts boxes", the "increased network usage" is 150 tb over 10 years, which sounds like a lot, but is really 41 gigs a day or less than 10 meg per box a day - incidental traffic (think 10-20 slashdot pages - heck, I've done 400 gigs in one month on a single box at home without breaking a sweat) - that wouldn't interfere with normal network usage in a system capable of supporting 5,000 computers. As for the "punching holes in the firewall" - you might want to read this and this - do you have a problem with ports 80 (http) and 443 (https/ssl) being "open"?
Riiight - having ports open so that users can surf the web is a terrible thing - quick - block ports 80 and 443 on your machine! It's a security risk!
Don't be a tool, mkay?
It's not like he would have remembered anything ...
... and ...
Some of those computers date back to 2000 - sleep mode?
Also, as comments in this article point out, the techs were forbidden from rolling out a script that would have turned the computers off at night, as it was against school policy.
Read the comments - some are from people who worked there, some from people who live there. It looks more like the guy was fired because someone - Superintendent Denise Birdwell - wanted to polish her image.
From the comments in this article (thanks to this post) from people who are there, it sounds like a real hatchet job.
Salient points:
I don't think you know what that word means.
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Tax 5 : to make onerous and rigorous demands on
Charging $40 to see an article that used to be free nd that is frequently outdated, obsolete, or inaccurate is really pushing the limits, as in "This paywall tax is taxing my patience."
It's also a "tax on stupidity", same as lotteries, not only because it encourages the use of outdated materials subjected to less review by outsiders, but also because it extracts a fee from those who do not know how to find the free version of many of the articles.
The paywalled articles are often stuff that was available free before the paywall went up. Also, since they're behind a paywall, people assume that they're actually more authoritative ("they must be worth more if you have to pay for them"), but often, because they are now behind paywalls, they're subject to less critical review (and in many cases are just plain out-of-date or even wrong).
The paywall won't be around in a decade or so - after all, as a researcher, you want both "street cred" and tenure, and that means that the more your articles are cited, the better - articles behind a paywall won't get cited as much, so it will eventually be seen as a bad career move.
It's a cookie. Then again, what's to stop people from downloading simplepie and making their own "news service", so that they don't have any contact with google whatsoever, so no google cookies, no google url data, no google referrer, etc.
I played around with it a year ago - a bit of work and you can have your own customized NotGoogleNews news crawler. Or set up multiple instances on multiple urls, and have notgooglenews.com/world, notgooglenews.com/, notgooglenews.com/us, notgooglenews.com/sports, notgooglenews.com/entertainment, notgooglenews.com/scitech, notgooglenews.com/business, notgooglenews.com/health - then scrape your individual feeds for the "front page".
The guy just has to do a scrape of the cache from the results of a google query of "site:craigslist.org" - it returns results from iowa, hawaii, san francisco, manila, singapore ...
Or scrape each cached result of a query based on each geographical area: "site:kansascity.craigslist.org", "site:losangeles.craigslist.org", etc.
Never need to hit the actual craigslist domain at all.
Let me fix that for you ...
When desktop computing got its start a turdle machine cost about $3,500, and a good one was double that. (And the definition of "good" was something that today you'd be ashamed to have sitting in your garbage can on collection day).
*grumble* You kids nowadays *grumble*
If you had read the summary (or the article), they weren't screen scraping - it was the rss feed.
They should also get rid of those "news crawler" tickers along the bottom of tv shots. Put the text up a line at a time and we'll read the at our own speed.
Or how about 2 feeds - one with the stupid crawlers, and one without.
Or maybe if I fiddle with my remote, there's a custom setting so I can stretch the screen enough to hide it.
[_] "I was adopted, you ignorant clod!" (and watch them go "Oh ...")
... or if you really want to scare them off ...
[_] I was born February 29th so I only have a sign every 4th year.
[_] What sign was I born under? Yellow Cab | Maternity Ward | Abortion Clinic ("I was a screw-up even back then")
[_] What's my sign? Well, I was born a [insert bogus info] and I was born again in [insert month] so now I'm really a [insert bogus info], so let me tell you all about Jeebus so you too can have two birthdays!
It's been great for National Unity - some of us can remember life before Toronto replaced Brian (Bullwinkle) Mulroney as the one thing the rest of the country can hate (who had replaced "and God Damn the CPR!").
It's still stupid, and as a Canadian I'm just glad that I live in Quebec and we run our program separately. english version. ... though someone should tell them the blink tag is dead!
In too many cases, the questions are along the lines of "I don't feel like doing my homework" or stuff like that. Or questions that could have been answered with the first search result from the text of the question itself. Or they're really slashvertisements. That's why many of these go off-topic; once 20 people have posted "justfuckinggoogleforit", ther's not much more on-topic.
In this case, the poster was either looking for absolution or wanted to brag a bit.
Now, as to doing away with "Ask Slashdot" - why not Ask Slashdot?
Personally, I have no problem with it, but then again, I have no problem with idle.slashdot.org either, so you can be excused for thinking I might be slightly brain-damaged.
Seriously, what is it with people not knowing right from wrong, or accepting responsibility for their own decisions? You're the one who has to sleep with whatever decision you make - why try to foist the blame on someone else if you decide wrong?
That's like one guy who said "My best friends' girlfriend wants to sleep with me - should I do it so I can show him what a sl*t she is?" If you're asking, it's because you want to do it and be able to say "don't blame me - everyone said it was okay !"
BTW - Good luck with whatever you decide, but a lot of us have been in the position of being able to do a lot worse, or been offered $$$ to do a lot worse, and you should be thankful we didn't have to get the group-think thing going before refusing.
Different tools for different jobs. For example, the USPS mandates the use of the System Networked Architecture Instructional Language for USPS mail servers.
"Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night shall stay these servers from the swift completion of their appointed tasklists".
Murdoch's point is that google is benefiting from it. They may not be benefiting directly (earning money from ads) but it certainly makes helps promote the google brand.
What I don't get is why Murdoch doesn't just start up his own distributed search engine specializing ONLY in news (or make a deal with someone to do the same), get everyone else on board, buy the news.com domain name from cnet, and drop all three indexes.
It's the same gouging as pay-as-you-go cell plans for people who can't get a cell phone on a contract.
It's the same gouging as the credit card companies are doing with their across-the-board rate raises even for customers who have always been up-to-date.
Then make it so the end user can, too. As to "why assume the worst?" http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/Business/story?id=1540568 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_by_Google
Really?
"Very consumer friendly" - tell that to the dissidents who got outed.
"NEW ideas" - like?
Free email? Nope. Plenty of others before them.
Phone calls over the internet? Even skype doesn't claim it was their idea.
Web-based apps? Nope - plenty of prior art going back to the spreadsheet applet in the Java demos.
Maps? Nope.
Indexing stuff? Nope.
Phoe operating system? Nope.
Payment services? Nope.
Affiliate advertising? Nope.
Google is an advertising company. You are their market research subject material. Their products are the alien anal probe. (okay - that last is an exaggeration - for now).
Google also syndicates those ugly banner ads. I specifically uninstalled adblock so I could keep an eye on all the scams my friend were sending me emails about ("look at this great opportunity", etc), and a LOT of them are from google. Including banners here on slashdot for "I got a government check for $INSERT_TENS_OF_THOUSANDS_OF_DOLLARS" scams.
And I can get a computer for A LOT LESS than what a dvd burner cost 10 years ago. So what? I can store a terabyte of data on my local hard disk for less than the cost of a modem a decade ago. And if that data happens to be my email, I can search it locally, which is a lot better than trusting it to google (and I can back up 16 gigs of email on a $25 usb stick).
Some people will be happy letting google or microsoft or apple run their lives - for the rest of us, there are alternatives. You get what you pay for.
Thjis is the guy who did the "Fake Steve Jobs" blog, bitching about Yahoo "lying" about how long Yang was going to be CEO
http://valleywag.gawker.com/5091609/newsweek-reporter-yahoo-pr-lying-sacks-of-s+++
Groklaw archive of all the pro-sco fud from Lying Lyns: http://www.groklaw.net/quotes/showperson.phtml?pid=30
The guy is scum. He also has no clue when it comes to the inner workings of technology (sort of like a lot of the "analysts" that you see getting it wrong all the time).