From everything I've read about it, it's very hard to fire a teacher. It's all but impossible to fire them if they are tenured. The only halfway pleasant and effective way to get rid of a teacher that needs the sack is to take them off any class they can do damage in and make their job as unpleasant as possible until they leave.
Have read several accounts of superintendents trying to fire a teacher that really needed to go. Typically involves over a year of gathering as much dirt as possible, building what would appear to be an "airtight case" against them, then spend the next four months fighting the union, school board, appeals, etc etc until you can finally shove them out, kicking and screaming. And then they just sue (usually more than once) and it just drags on and on. Altogether probably the most challenging aspect of being a superintendent. All you can do is try very hard to hire winners, and pray you don't get started in the hole.
I'd also be interested to know who they spilled the secrets to. Wanna bet, their girlfriends 98% of the time?
No wonder men complain that women don't tell them how they feel etc. They're too busy dishing the dirt over the backyard fence to have time for any other communications.
I was just looking at that and the compartmentalized cooling is basically the same thing that apple has been doing since the powermac g5's came out. Some models have up to 7 fans, all of which are speed controlled and managed by sometimes over 11 temperature sensors. Dedicated fans for optical drive, power supply (intake as well as exhaust), processors, expansion slot bay.
Instead of just cracking up the fans to max RPMs all the time, they only spin as fast as is necessary to keep things in spec for each zone. And it also avoids the huge temperature swings that occur in fixed fan systems that go from frigid to warm and back again every time you do something.
Makes working on them slightly more difficult though with having to remove plates and covers etc. Though for the most part apple does a really good job of keeping the fans out of your way. For the PMG5 for instance, the processor fans have to be removed to add RAM, but doing that involves flipping a latch, swinging open a door, swinging open an air guide, and pulling a fan back on a guide and socket. No tools, and still faster access than almost anything. The new mac pros you just open the door (no air guide to bother with) and pull out the memory cards. (no fan to remove)
BUT... take a quad G5 and put something intense on it, and you will known the true meaning of "loud computer". (the models with the special high current power cord) We had one of those generate a noticeable air movement 25 feet down a hallway when going full tilt, it almost sounded like a small shop-vac. But, as soon as we quit the test apps, it was dead silent again within 25 seconds. That's how things aught to work. Fortunately the new mac pros run soooo much cooler that you never get anywhere near that much noise when they're cracked wide open encoding video etc.
sat tv boxes already use this. The hackers need to get the encryption key off a chip in the box. To get the eprom on the chip back into a readable state requires burning some gates/traces on the processing layer with a laser. To prevent this, the manufacturers overlay a layer on top of the main layer with another that is part of the power supply to the lower layer. So if they burn away the top to get at the bottom to modify it, the chip is disabled.
The determined hackers just burn off the top and study the lower circuit under said microscope and "decompile" it instead of tweaking it into just turning over the key. Once you have its rom visible and know the algorithm you have the key.
Physical access is always vulnerable. There will never be an exception. They can only make it difficult, never impossible.
Way I look at it is, if they only have remote access, it's possible to make it unhackable. If they have physical access, it's always going to be possible to hack into it. Maybe very very difficult, and possibly very expensive, but never impossible.
Satellite TV boxes have been exploring this truth for many years now, they're probably the experts in the field. Right now what it takes is an expensive microscope and a lab. If they can't keep hackers out, what on earth is this netbook group thinking??
good point about no firewire on some, but um.... there is no target mode for usb?
For them, boot off a USB hard drive (with OS installed on it) that has the base image on it also. Do your format and restore of internal hard drive from there. For those cases you need a 1/2 dozen or so usb ext HDs.
It's interesting that they are initially hiring the managers, and not the salesmen, something which hasn't really been addressed in this thread. They're not after the salesmen, at least not initially, they're going after management. That makes one wonder if the motive is (A) to drain the management at apple or (B) to enhance it at microsoft? (or both equally?) Third possibility is that they don't care so much about the managers and are only interested in hand picking out the cherries in the retail or genius bar area as stated in the article.
All of this comes as no surprise to anyone. MS has already done what they do best, copy success. They did it with the ads, it only makes sense that they're doing it in the retail stores, best they can. It'll probably turn out as well as it has been for the most part lately... poorly.
Tossing my wild speculation into the pot, I'd say it looks like they want to see if there's something superior about apple's way of managing a retail store that they can assimilate into their stores, by way of transplanting a few managers over. The salesmen really don't matter in this, it's the managers selecting and hiring the salesmen that counts. There's too much churn in retail to accomplish much by stealing your competition's retail staff, and the gains are too short-lived. Should be interesting to see how this new application of "embrace, expand, exterminate" works for MS... (and I'm interested to see how Apple reacts to it? pay raises? no compete agreements? both?)
You're likely to get some laptops in addition to desktops. Get yourself a large room, a dozen or more firewire cables, power strips together. Before the machines arrive, use a macbook pro or macbook (a laptop) to develop your base image. Install all software on it that is going to be on most of the machines. Test thoroughly. Be sure all your remote access is tested. (ARD/SSH)
Use netrestore to create the base image. When the computers arrive, copy the base image to a group of laptops, with netrestore app. The number varies depending on how many computers you are going to be imaging, the size of your base image, and how much help you have. 8-12 is typical if only one person is going to be restoring.
First thing you should do with machines out of the box is label them, have labels made up in advance. Then set them all up imaging over firewire, just get an assembly line going. You CAN do netrestore over the network, but it's been my experience it's less reliable. (machines randomly fail to restore, sometimes entire groups fail at an annoying 99% etc) Firewire is usually faster anyway since your fileserver or switch is very unlikely to be able to keep up with imaging a dozen at once. FW800 imaging is an amazing thing.
Once machines are imaged, there should be a folder of scripts sitting on each machine's local admin acct, one for each group of machines. The script will prompt for computer name and run. When run it will rename the computer and delete all the apps that should not be on that particular image. This can also be done by running the script remotely over apple remote desktop. If you don't have ARD, *get it now*. It will save you incredible amounts of time. Using this removal script method adds only a few minutes of time per image but you're doing them in parallel so its negligible, and saves you the major headache of managing a half dozen different base images.
As long as you made the image on a laptop, it should have full hardware support for the camera etc. Different images are required for PPC, but fortunately that's not a headache you have to worry about. (I did, PAIN)
Boot camp adds a level of complexity, requiring you to partition the hard drives before restoring to them, and then using something like Ghost or Acronis. One person can image between 40-80 machines in 8 hrs depending on how things go. Helps to have grunts to do the minor things like unpacking and delivery to stations. Find some carts so you can move machines several at a time. Inform the cleaning staff that you're going to have a mountain of packing material to dispose of. Keep 1 box for every 20 machines in case you need to box them up to send to a repair shop down the road.
If you insist on using netrestore over the network, be sure you have multicast enabled on the switches. It doesn't like crossing subnets but can be made to work.
There are towns in the US in which every aid need be applied to protect kids. Some places are simply way too dangerous.
Another example of people having kids without considering the circumstances they're in if you ask me. If you insist on raising your kids in bad conditions, it does not automatically become society's responsibility to care for them for you.
Another vote for "don't child-proof the world - world-proof the child"
If you can't afford to have a kid. If you don't have time to take care of a kid. If you live in an unsafe place to raise a kid. don't have a kid.
The durable facts that matter is that they committed an offense at the time it was illegal.
After the fact, they can be granted immunity, and it can be repealed, repeatedly even. The fact that they broke a a law that existed at the time cannot be changed. Only the present enforcement of the past violation can be changed.
They cannot of course change the definition of what was illegal in the past, or the scope, or the punishment. THAT would be unconstitutional.
This would have been so much more entertaining if he'd logged into twitter to tweet about his burglary-in-progress... I leave it as an exercise for the readers to come up with appropriate tweets below:
It's possible they may sell another $5 upgrade for N as they did when N first came out, for the macbooks that shipped juuust before N was announced on them.
well the summarywas missing that, and I had to (gasp!) read the story to find out. But still it belonged in the summary.
A long time ago I recall hearing "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of 9-tracks tooling down the highway". Reminds me of this. For a number of years now, the ratio of data storage per pound vs network speed has remained largely unbalanced, and isn't likely to ever change. I can fedex overnight a crate full of 1tb HDDs for a heck of a lot less cost than the bandwidth required to push the same amount of data across the country in the same amount of time. Really this pidgeon thing is a strawman, And they could have easily put a 16-32gb flash on it instead to up the ante.
To my surprise, my garmin supports GPX format, and saves nicely in XML. Saves waypoints, track logs, routes, etc. Very nice. Inspired me to write an XML parser so I could edit my waypoints.
So TomTom thinks they got it first eh? And we know how MS is known for assisting with standards as of late...
agree. and really if you think about it, if you have a monopoly, you're probably raking in basketfuls of money, so if you can "do not evil" and cut your pure profits from 30% to 25%, (and be a "benevolent monopoly") everyone is happy. (except the freaks that consider any monopoly to be evil, but trying to please them is just plain a waste of time)
The only problem is when the board or majority shareholders would rather net that 5% by "any means necessary". Which does tend to happen with large companies like M$.
By that definition, Apple is a monopoly because...
CORRECT! but being a monopoly isn't illegal. Read that again.
ABUSING your monopoly position, THAT is illegal. Read the linked wikipedia article, they go into length describing this. It's amazing how many people think monopolies are illegal...
One very common monopoly abuse is when you use your monopoly status in one market to gain an advantage in another market. For example, if you're selling widgets in all 50 states, and you halve your price in the states that have competitors selling widgets, and double your prices in the other states that you have no competition in to cover selling them at a loss in the other states (to drive your competition out of business in those other states), that'll get you jumped really fast.
Microsoft has had monopolistic practices, but they are not (by definition) a monopoly.
Naturally that depends on what your definition of monopoly is, but one common definition seems to be:
In economics, a monopoly exists when a specific individual or an enterprise has sufficient control over a particular product or service to determine significantly the terms on which other individuals shall have access to it.
Microsoft consistently fits this definition. Though Europe seems to be a bit more consistent in enforcing it, probably because MS's lobbying is far less effective across the pond.
We have a lot of turtledoves around here and they make a very loud whistling sound when they take off abruptly, usually causing every small critter (birds, squirrels, etc) in the area to scramble. Nothing new here?
Slashdot Mirror
but that's only for making deposits? and watch out for the penalty for early withdrawl....
"Customers always find an approach which pays us less money."
of course. it's called piracy. Duh?
From everything I've read about it, it's very hard to fire a teacher. It's all but impossible to fire them if they are tenured. The only halfway pleasant and effective way to get rid of a teacher that needs the sack is to take them off any class they can do damage in and make their job as unpleasant as possible until they leave.
Have read several accounts of superintendents trying to fire a teacher that really needed to go. Typically involves over a year of gathering as much dirt as possible, building what would appear to be an "airtight case" against them, then spend the next four months fighting the union, school board, appeals, etc etc until you can finally shove them out, kicking and screaming. And then they just sue (usually more than once) and it just drags on and on. Altogether probably the most challenging aspect of being a superintendent. All you can do is try very hard to hire winners, and pray you don't get started in the hole.
I'd also be interested to know who they spilled the secrets to. Wanna bet, their girlfriends 98% of the time?
No wonder men complain that women don't tell them how they feel etc. They're too busy dishing the dirt over the backyard fence to have time for any other communications.
I was just looking at that and the compartmentalized cooling is basically the same thing that apple has been doing since the powermac g5's came out. Some models have up to 7 fans, all of which are speed controlled and managed by sometimes over 11 temperature sensors. Dedicated fans for optical drive, power supply (intake as well as exhaust), processors, expansion slot bay.
Instead of just cracking up the fans to max RPMs all the time, they only spin as fast as is necessary to keep things in spec for each zone. And it also avoids the huge temperature swings that occur in fixed fan systems that go from frigid to warm and back again every time you do something.
Makes working on them slightly more difficult though with having to remove plates and covers etc. Though for the most part apple does a really good job of keeping the fans out of your way. For the PMG5 for instance, the processor fans have to be removed to add RAM, but doing that involves flipping a latch, swinging open a door, swinging open an air guide, and pulling a fan back on a guide and socket. No tools, and still faster access than almost anything. The new mac pros you just open the door (no air guide to bother with) and pull out the memory cards. (no fan to remove)
BUT... take a quad G5 and put something intense on it, and you will known the true meaning of "loud computer". (the models with the special high current power cord) We had one of those generate a noticeable air movement 25 feet down a hallway when going full tilt, it almost sounded like a small shop-vac. But, as soon as we quit the test apps, it was dead silent again within 25 seconds. That's how things aught to work. Fortunately the new mac pros run soooo much cooler that you never get anywhere near that much noise when they're cracked wide open encoding video etc.
What about self destruct mechanisms?
sat tv boxes already use this. The hackers need to get the encryption key off a chip in the box. To get the eprom on the chip back into a readable state requires burning some gates/traces on the processing layer with a laser. To prevent this, the manufacturers overlay a layer on top of the main layer with another that is part of the power supply to the lower layer. So if they burn away the top to get at the bottom to modify it, the chip is disabled.
The determined hackers just burn off the top and study the lower circuit under said microscope and "decompile" it instead of tweaking it into just turning over the key. Once you have its rom visible and know the algorithm you have the key.
Physical access is always vulnerable. There will never be an exception. They can only make it difficult, never impossible.
physical access >> root access
Way I look at it is, if they only have remote access, it's possible to make it unhackable. If they have physical access, it's always going to be possible to hack into it. Maybe very very difficult, and possibly very expensive, but never impossible.
Satellite TV boxes have been exploring this truth for many years now, they're probably the experts in the field. Right now what it takes is an expensive microscope and a lab. If they can't keep hackers out, what on earth is this netbook group thinking??
good point about no firewire on some, but um.... there is no target mode for usb?
For them, boot off a USB hard drive (with OS installed on it) that has the base image on it also. Do your format and restore of internal hard drive from there. For those cases you need a 1/2 dozen or so usb ext HDs.
It's interesting that they are initially hiring the managers, and not the salesmen, something which hasn't really been addressed in this thread. They're not after the salesmen, at least not initially, they're going after management. That makes one wonder if the motive is (A) to drain the management at apple or (B) to enhance it at microsoft? (or both equally?) Third possibility is that they don't care so much about the managers and are only interested in hand picking out the cherries in the retail or genius bar area as stated in the article.
All of this comes as no surprise to anyone. MS has already done what they do best, copy success. They did it with the ads, it only makes sense that they're doing it in the retail stores, best they can. It'll probably turn out as well as it has been for the most part lately... poorly.
Tossing my wild speculation into the pot, I'd say it looks like they want to see if there's something superior about apple's way of managing a retail store that they can assimilate into their stores, by way of transplanting a few managers over. The salesmen really don't matter in this, it's the managers selecting and hiring the salesmen that counts. There's too much churn in retail to accomplish much by stealing your competition's retail staff, and the gains are too short-lived. Should be interesting to see how this new application of "embrace, expand, exterminate" works for MS... (and I'm interested to see how Apple reacts to it? pay raises? no compete agreements? both?)
You're likely to get some laptops in addition to desktops. Get yourself a large room, a dozen or more firewire cables, power strips together. Before the machines arrive, use a macbook pro or macbook (a laptop) to develop your base image. Install all software on it that is going to be on most of the machines. Test thoroughly. Be sure all your remote access is tested. (ARD/SSH)
Use netrestore to create the base image. When the computers arrive, copy the base image to a group of laptops, with netrestore app. The number varies depending on how many computers you are going to be imaging, the size of your base image, and how much help you have. 8-12 is typical if only one person is going to be restoring.
First thing you should do with machines out of the box is label them, have labels made up in advance. Then set them all up imaging over firewire, just get an assembly line going. You CAN do netrestore over the network, but it's been my experience it's less reliable. (machines randomly fail to restore, sometimes entire groups fail at an annoying 99% etc) Firewire is usually faster anyway since your fileserver or switch is very unlikely to be able to keep up with imaging a dozen at once. FW800 imaging is an amazing thing.
Once machines are imaged, there should be a folder of scripts sitting on each machine's local admin acct, one for each group of machines. The script will prompt for computer name and run. When run it will rename the computer and delete all the apps that should not be on that particular image. This can also be done by running the script remotely over apple remote desktop. If you don't have ARD, *get it now*. It will save you incredible amounts of time. Using this removal script method adds only a few minutes of time per image but you're doing them in parallel so its negligible, and saves you the major headache of managing a half dozen different base images.
As long as you made the image on a laptop, it should have full hardware support for the camera etc. Different images are required for PPC, but fortunately that's not a headache you have to worry about. (I did, PAIN)
Boot camp adds a level of complexity, requiring you to partition the hard drives before restoring to them, and then using something like Ghost or Acronis. One person can image between 40-80 machines in 8 hrs depending on how things go. Helps to have grunts to do the minor things like unpacking and delivery to stations. Find some carts so you can move machines several at a time. Inform the cleaning staff that you're going to have a mountain of packing material to dispose of. Keep 1 box for every 20 machines in case you need to box them up to send to a repair shop down the road.
If you insist on using netrestore over the network, be sure you have multicast enabled on the switches. It doesn't like crossing subnets but can be made to work.
There are towns in the US in which every aid need be applied to protect kids. Some places are simply way too dangerous.
Another example of people having kids without considering the circumstances they're in if you ask me. If you insist on raising your kids in bad conditions, it does not automatically become society's responsibility to care for them for you.
Another vote for "don't child-proof the world - world-proof the child"
If you can't afford to have a kid. If you don't have time to take care of a kid. If you live in an unsafe place to raise a kid. don't have a kid.
The durable facts that matter is that they committed an offense at the time it was illegal.
After the fact, they can be granted immunity, and it can be repealed, repeatedly even. The fact that they broke a a law that existed at the time cannot be changed. Only the present enforcement of the past violation can be changed.
They cannot of course change the definition of what was illegal in the past, or the scope, or the punishment. THAT would be unconstitutional.
This would have been so much more entertaining if he'd logged into twitter to tweet about his burglary-in-progress... I leave it as an exercise for the readers to come up with appropriate tweets below:
It's possible they may sell another $5 upgrade for N as they did when N first came out, for the macbooks that shipped juuust before N was announced on them.
well they don't WANT you to locate it. They WANT you to buy another one...
well the summary was missing that, and I had to (gasp!) read the story to find out. But still it belonged in the summary.
A long time ago I recall hearing "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of 9-tracks tooling down the highway". Reminds me of this. For a number of years now, the ratio of data storage per pound vs network speed has remained largely unbalanced, and isn't likely to ever change. I can fedex overnight a crate full of 1tb HDDs for a heck of a lot less cost than the bandwidth required to push the same amount of data across the country in the same amount of time. Really this pidgeon thing is a strawman, And they could have easily put a 16-32gb flash on it instead to up the ante.
To my surprise, my garmin supports GPX format, and saves nicely in XML. Saves waypoints, track logs, routes, etc. Very nice. Inspired me to write an XML parser so I could edit my waypoints.
So TomTom thinks they got it first eh? And we know how MS is known for assisting with standards as of late...
at least the video is still up. I was hoping to nab a few more nice space wallpapers for my rotation though.
Was that video a MBP-fest or what? guess they have a preference ;)
agree. and really if you think about it, if you have a monopoly, you're probably raking in basketfuls of money, so if you can "do not evil" and cut your pure profits from 30% to 25%, (and be a "benevolent monopoly") everyone is happy. (except the freaks that consider any monopoly to be evil, but trying to please them is just plain a waste of time)
The only problem is when the board or majority shareholders would rather net that 5% by "any means necessary". Which does tend to happen with large companies like M$.
By that definition, Apple is a monopoly because...
CORRECT! but being a monopoly isn't illegal. Read that again.
ABUSING your monopoly position, THAT is illegal. Read the linked wikipedia article, they go into length describing this. It's amazing how many people think monopolies are illegal...
One very common monopoly abuse is when you use your monopoly status in one market to gain an advantage in another market. For example, if you're selling widgets in all 50 states, and you halve your price in the states that have competitors selling widgets, and double your prices in the other states that you have no competition in to cover selling them at a loss in the other states (to drive your competition out of business in those other states), that'll get you jumped really fast.
Microsoft has had monopolistic practices, but they are not (by definition) a monopoly.
Naturally that depends on what your definition of monopoly is, but one common definition seems to be:
In economics, a monopoly exists when a specific individual or an enterprise has sufficient control over a particular product or service to determine significantly the terms on which other individuals shall have access to it.
Microsoft consistently fits this definition. Though Europe seems to be a bit more consistent in enforcing it, probably because MS's lobbying is far less effective across the pond.
Apple II had this in 1979. Back then we called it a "jump table". :)
You have to be pretty nerdy to consider installing windows on 15-20 of your closest friends laptops a "party."
More like pretty sadistic
aka "good way to lose 15-20 friends"?
My PowerShot S3-IS is scriptable. (example) And it's not even a cutting edge camera. Lots of cams support scripting.
We have a lot of turtledoves around here and they make a very loud whistling sound when they take off abruptly, usually causing every small critter (birds, squirrels, etc) in the area to scramble. Nothing new here?