When dealing with Utilities, there is no way for the company to pay back without taking the money from the rate payers. The only real way to do it is for the government ot require the company to issue stock representing a percentage of the company value that would go to the government. Therefore the owners of the company ie stock holders pay for the damage they caused by placing idiots in charge and the government can then sell the stock to pay for the cleanup or hold it in trust to ensure this does not happen again.
My problem is all the school administrators talking about how this improves campus safety. Even though it can only track tagged kids. The guy with high powered rifle walking onto the campus cant be sensed or tracked by the system.
The other thing is these are active battery powered tags, which are very expensive. Why cant they just have standard cards with passive rfid chips, like a lot of us use for mass transit. Then instead of a tracking system switch all the doors in the school to remain locked at all times and only unlock for an ID swipe. With the kids badges opening doors they need to get into (main doors, bathrooms, even classrooms for their specific classes) and Staff cards open most doors. Then the guy with a gun comes to the campus and can't get in the door to start with (unless they shoot out the lock but that starts police response) The campus is more safe because most doors are closed and locked by default making it harder to go from room to room.
I think these things are a privacy night mare. Most kids will keep them in purses or wallets, if I worked in retail the first thing I do is place readers by the doors and checkout registers that ping the cards since I can read them in someones purse or pocket. I only get a number but I will know how often that number enters the store, when and what they spend money on. If they use a credit card at checkout I now know the name of the person and can attach it to the ID number. There are no laws preventing me from doing this. If the tags where passive this would be almost impossible.
Apple ran solaris for years and then eventually moved to OS X, when they did that some of there employees at mac world refered to eating there own dog food. OS X is BSD, and server can run without a UI, They probably will run the whole thing on OSX, mind you they will probably be optimizing the stack.
We keep on looking at this stuff and we just standardized on mac minis without applecare. If a computer does not fail in the first year chances are it never will. If we replace 1 out of every 10 machines out of pocket we are still ahead in warranty costs. Windows volume licenses in corp/education/government can hop machines. The big part is Mac Minis are basically mill spec intel boxes. Standard drivers good speed etc. For 90 percent of the button pushers they are always powerful enough. It seems an odd choice but apple seems to get more reliable machines out of china than anyone else, we simply spend less time with dead boxes with the macs.
The big money cost is internal staff assembling your own machines. Even if you think you are fast you are not and after 100 machines you will never want to build another computer again.
Its not just a website its a complete revamping of there entire infrastructure, network, workstation, servers, phone,s software and employee training. Plus... They are Oracle based. Of course they should be moving towards open source, lower those license costs.
Not just a little fountain something of significant size with a good amount of falling water. The extra natural moisture in the air makes the air smell better and is easier to breath, than simply recycled AC with a humidifier. It helps regulate the temp a little. Also lots of plants. And when people talk about good lighting use natural color balanced light, or more simply florescent fixtures known as grow lights. And make sure maintanence isn't allowed to cheap out on replacement bulbs later on and switch your staff back to cheap standard flourescent when bulbs get changed out. Or your hard work is for knot.
We use service based names and numbers. But I would love to switch to more fun names if for the only reason when we purchased ns3 to replace ns2, ns2 remained online for another year doing other duties before its end of life leaving me with ns1, ns3 and ns4. Names like this exist all over my workplace and renaming servers affects to many other things. But if I installed sleepy and threw away grumpy a year later the names still all look fine. The obsessive compulsive hates missing numbers in a series.
As a school IT staffer, we all live under budgets. Building from scratch concentrate on all the classrooms. Every room needs a sound system, projector and document camera if budget allows. If there is a larger amount of money then perhaps those smartboards everyone wants (though ours seem to go rather unused by the people who wanted them)
Finally lots of network ports. Classrooms need enough network for each student to plug in a laptop or computer into copper or have PC's along the edges of the room, wireless no matter how good cannot handle 30 kids hitting something at the same time.
While laptops seem cool, we still use PC's because of cost, laptops cost at least a third more than desktop pc's and last a couple years less. We have used several machines with 20 inch monitors so the students can work in a group which works quite well. However student computer use is coriculum driven and needs more teacher input.
One of the best ways to get excercise is to have motivation. Rescue a Golden Retriever or any other medium to large dog. They will guilt trip you onto the end of a leash every day. I never thought I had time to walk a dog, but seem to have no problem getting it done.
This used to be my ritual when I worked for a company that had me managing a large number of construction sights. Tuesday morning was the big construction manager meeting at 7:30 they roll in at 7:00. I always got in at 6:30 booted up the computer then I headed to the coffee area and started brewing the 6 carafes of coffee everyone would chug down in the morning. From that spot I would talk to every site manager, and local user in this section of the company. By 7:15 they all thought I was a great guy making the coffee and I new every single problem or need in the company and would have a list of what to do for the rest of the week. Then it was off to email voice mail and checking the other projects.
Apple and Intel where a good fit. If you talk to or know any apple engineers working on the platform, Intel has had staff members on the apple campus. The culture within the two companies is very similar. When you have something that works that well, you don't toss it.
Why would apple want AMD? They are a chip manufacturer and a completely different company from Apple. Apple does not want to enter the market of selling processor chips to other companies like Dell, HP, etc... Its like purchasing the city sewer system outright so you can flush a toilet.
The problem is the judge has overstepped there bounds. The Judge made up there own lay. This judge said the law states blank but I think they where wrong when they wrote it so I am going to pretend it says bland. The law says email. IM is not email. They law should be vauge and simply include all forms of electronic communication. Solicitation is solicitation. Judges should rule based on the written law. If a law is poorly written state that in the ruling give the public a reason to demand a change. We are government based on checks and balances. Legislature makes lawys, judicial enforces. Judicial is not there to make up there own laws in order to enforce what they "think" justice is. We have this balance because we can change the legislature every two years or so. We don't ge to change judges.
Umm the credit card companies know what companies are online gambling sites, they will simply take that list and not allow any CC transactions to those companies. The hope is most of the people who loose money gambling get pulled in due to the simplicity. While there are ways around the credit card thing, it requires a lot of hoop jumping and most people will stop the minute it starts askinc for checking account info and not letting them use a credit card. And I am sure if it becomes a problem with debit transactions congress can simply pass another law making it illegal for banks to transfer money to offshore gambling companies.
I don't look at it as trying to convert them I look at it as making them legal. I refuse to install pirated applications. Most of the time when I re build for a home customer they have duplicated install cd's from a friend, child and so fourth. They dont have an MS office license or a photoshop license.
I tell them that I wont help them break the law and then tell them I have free alternatives they can try legally if it doesnt work I will be more than happy to assist them in purchasing and installing the software they want legaly. Normally with the cost of MS office everyone is willing to give it a try.
My load is Open Office Firefox Seamonkey Picasa2 paint.net foxit reader pdfcreator iTunes Quicktime
I know its not all OSS but it the load I find gives the most people what they want. Very rarely do I get called back to install MS office, and I have never come back to find an illegal copy of MS office after I load the OSS alternatives.
The problem the government is plannin on saving beurocrats and politicions. No one with any of the actual skills that would be required to save society. I keep thinking of the hitchhikers guide to the galaxy and the ship filled with middle management and telephone cleaners.
We may have martha as an example but for the most part lying to the court is not prosecuted, and its killing our legal system. In the last few years only 1 case for perjury in the entire nation has been filed. We all know that a lot more poeple are lying under oath. You should also not lie to the authorities, we have a special sentance that you say in lue of lying "I want my lawyer" But these white collar criminals executives companies and even regular people that lie under oath need to get prosecuted. Justice is not served if the court is lyed to. And the courts will not become fair untill prosecuters start investigating, charging and convicting people for purjery. It is undermining our legal system
The reason colaboration software fails is the weakest link. It only takes one person on the team, or one asshole manager to not use the colaboration software, and its worthless and everyone reverts back to email. I've been through it we deploy a great system, everyone starts using it. One person refuses to use or learn the system starts emailing everyone. There information is suddenly no longer in the system. Everyone else gets tired of using the colab system and then emailing the information to the one person not using it. It becomes double entry everyone starts thinking its stupid and in less that 2 weeks its out the door and everyone is using email.
If people just paid for someone to set there computer up right they would avoid a lot of hastle. WinXP, free-av.com, Microsoft Spyware. IE disabled firefox and mozilla installed. Computer autologging into a restricted account and requiring a logout and login as admin to install software, hardware firewall between them and the broadband account.
They would pretty much not need much help after that. Its all these people that plug an open admin enabled computer up to a cable modem that get into trouble
If I am setting up a netgear or any other router and give it a password of course I write down the password and tape it to the bottom of the device. We are trying to keep other wireless users off of the network. If they can read the password off of the bottom of the basestation, then they are in your home and you probably do not mind them being on the network. As long as you can't see the password from outside the house then you are quite secure and if you forget the password its waiting for you.
I'd like to see them benchmark the 2003 IIS server against a stock OS X server. on equal machines, or as close to equal as possible. While sales people use stuff like this. A slightly slower but stable webserver will beat out whatever speed machine one can come up with. And we all know you can build multiple redundant unix servers for the cost of MS licensing.
I work where a lot of "smart building" technology has been implemented though its a school setting so the air handleing is not a critical as with a high rise building. What I found and what a lot of IT staff in smart building find. Is they are being put in charge of this stuff not because they are proficient with smart building systems but becuase it involves a computer so dump it on IT and save money. Companies look at a lot of this stuff as we no longer need a highly paid building systems guy we only need sub minimum wage janitors and IT will handle the Power, HVAC and so fourth because its computerized and thats what they do. A lot of the time this stuff is sold as a way to save money. And it does more efficient light use, HVAC savings by only powering up exactly what is needed for ocupied areas. But many times its also sold because in theory staff can be "condensed".
I still like all the smart building stuff it can save money and make office conditions more comfortable and consistent.
We use a plastic vapor barier in home construction called HouseWrap. While wapp paper seems like a PITA since you need to do floors and ceilings if they made housewrap that could do vapor barier and be the wi-fi shield I'd toss it on my place. The ability to hit a wall switch and block cell phones would also be an advantage for say a dinner party where there is one moron who wants to talk on the phone all the time.
When dealing with Utilities, there is no way for the company to pay back without taking the money from the rate payers. The only real way to do it is for the government ot require the company to issue stock representing a percentage of the company value that would go to the government. Therefore the owners of the company ie stock holders pay for the damage they caused by placing idiots in charge and the government can then sell the stock to pay for the cleanup or hold it in trust to ensure this does not happen again.
Despite the hate for ATT corperate, they have some extremely good engineers who are either scratching there heads or totally freaking out.
My problem is all the school administrators talking about how this improves campus safety. Even though it can only track tagged kids. The guy with high powered rifle walking onto the campus cant be sensed or tracked by the system. The other thing is these are active battery powered tags, which are very expensive. Why cant they just have standard cards with passive rfid chips, like a lot of us use for mass transit. Then instead of a tracking system switch all the doors in the school to remain locked at all times and only unlock for an ID swipe. With the kids badges opening doors they need to get into (main doors, bathrooms, even classrooms for their specific classes) and Staff cards open most doors. Then the guy with a gun comes to the campus and can't get in the door to start with (unless they shoot out the lock but that starts police response) The campus is more safe because most doors are closed and locked by default making it harder to go from room to room. I think these things are a privacy night mare. Most kids will keep them in purses or wallets, if I worked in retail the first thing I do is place readers by the doors and checkout registers that ping the cards since I can read them in someones purse or pocket. I only get a number but I will know how often that number enters the store, when and what they spend money on. If they use a credit card at checkout I now know the name of the person and can attach it to the ID number. There are no laws preventing me from doing this. If the tags where passive this would be almost impossible.
Apple ran solaris for years and then eventually moved to OS X, when they did that some of there employees at mac world refered to eating there own dog food. OS X is BSD, and server can run without a UI, They probably will run the whole thing on OSX, mind you they will probably be optimizing the stack.
We keep on looking at this stuff and we just standardized on mac minis without applecare. If a computer does not fail in the first year chances are it never will. If we replace 1 out of every 10 machines out of pocket we are still ahead in warranty costs. Windows volume licenses in corp/education/government can hop machines. The big part is Mac Minis are basically mill spec intel boxes. Standard drivers good speed etc. For 90 percent of the button pushers they are always powerful enough. It seems an odd choice but apple seems to get more reliable machines out of china than anyone else, we simply spend less time with dead boxes with the macs. The big money cost is internal staff assembling your own machines. Even if you think you are fast you are not and after 100 machines you will never want to build another computer again.
Its not just a website its a complete revamping of there entire infrastructure, network, workstation, servers, phone,s software and employee training. Plus... They are Oracle based. Of course they should be moving towards open source, lower those license costs.
Not just a little fountain something of significant size with a good amount of falling water. The extra natural moisture in the air makes the air smell better and is easier to breath, than simply recycled AC with a humidifier. It helps regulate the temp a little. Also lots of plants. And when people talk about good lighting use natural color balanced light, or more simply florescent fixtures known as grow lights. And make sure maintanence isn't allowed to cheap out on replacement bulbs later on and switch your staff back to cheap standard flourescent when bulbs get changed out. Or your hard work is for knot.
We use service based names and numbers. But I would love to switch to more fun names if for the only reason when we purchased ns3 to replace ns2, ns2 remained online for another year doing other duties before its end of life leaving me with ns1, ns3 and ns4. Names like this exist all over my workplace and renaming servers affects to many other things. But if I installed sleepy and threw away grumpy a year later the names still all look fine. The obsessive compulsive hates missing numbers in a series.
As a school IT staffer, we all live under budgets. Building from scratch concentrate on all the classrooms. Every room needs a sound system, projector and document camera if budget allows. If there is a larger amount of money then perhaps those smartboards everyone wants (though ours seem to go rather unused by the people who wanted them) Finally lots of network ports. Classrooms need enough network for each student to plug in a laptop or computer into copper or have PC's along the edges of the room, wireless no matter how good cannot handle 30 kids hitting something at the same time. While laptops seem cool, we still use PC's because of cost, laptops cost at least a third more than desktop pc's and last a couple years less. We have used several machines with 20 inch monitors so the students can work in a group which works quite well. However student computer use is coriculum driven and needs more teacher input.
One of the best ways to get excercise is to have motivation. Rescue a Golden Retriever or any other medium to large dog. They will guilt trip you onto the end of a leash every day. I never thought I had time to walk a dog, but seem to have no problem getting it done.
This used to be my ritual when I worked for a company that had me managing a large number of construction sights. Tuesday morning was the big construction manager meeting at 7:30 they roll in at 7:00. I always got in at 6:30 booted up the computer then I headed to the coffee area and started brewing the 6 carafes of coffee everyone would chug down in the morning. From that spot I would talk to every site manager, and local user in this section of the company. By 7:15 they all thought I was a great guy making the coffee and I new every single problem or need in the company and would have a list of what to do for the rest of the week. Then it was off to email voice mail and checking the other projects.
Apple and Intel where a good fit. If you talk to or know any apple engineers working on the platform, Intel has had staff members on the apple campus. The culture within the two companies is very similar. When you have something that works that well, you don't toss it.
Why would apple want AMD? They are a chip manufacturer and a completely different company from Apple. Apple does not want to enter the market of selling processor chips to other companies like Dell, HP, etc... Its like purchasing the city sewer system outright so you can flush a toilet.
The problem is the judge has overstepped there bounds. The Judge made up there own lay. This judge said the law states blank but I think they where wrong when they wrote it so I am going to pretend it says bland. The law says email. IM is not email. They law should be vauge and simply include all forms of electronic communication. Solicitation is solicitation. Judges should rule based on the written law. If a law is poorly written state that in the ruling give the public a reason to demand a change. We are government based on checks and balances. Legislature makes lawys, judicial enforces. Judicial is not there to make up there own laws in order to enforce what they "think" justice is. We have this balance because we can change the legislature every two years or so. We don't ge to change judges.
Umm the credit card companies know what companies are online gambling sites, they will simply take that list and not allow any CC transactions to those companies. The hope is most of the people who loose money gambling get pulled in due to the simplicity. While there are ways around the credit card thing, it requires a lot of hoop jumping and most people will stop the minute it starts askinc for checking account info and not letting them use a credit card. And I am sure if it becomes a problem with debit transactions congress can simply pass another law making it illegal for banks to transfer money to offshore gambling companies.
I don't look at it as trying to convert them I look at it as making them legal. I refuse to install pirated applications. Most of the time when I re build for a home customer they have duplicated install cd's from a friend, child and so fourth. They dont have an MS office license or a photoshop license.
I tell them that I wont help them break the law and then tell them I have free alternatives they can try legally if it doesnt work I will be more than happy to assist them in purchasing and installing the software they want legaly. Normally with the cost of MS office everyone is willing to give it a try.
My load is
Open Office
Firefox
Seamonkey
Picasa2
paint.net
foxit reader
pdfcreator
iTunes
Quicktime
I know its not all OSS but it the load I find gives the most people what they want. Very rarely do I get called back to install MS office, and I have never come back to find an illegal copy of MS office after I load the OSS alternatives.
The problem the government is plannin on saving beurocrats and politicions. No one with any of the actual skills that would be required to save society. I keep thinking of the hitchhikers guide to the galaxy and the ship filled with middle management and telephone cleaners.
We may have martha as an example but for the most part lying to the court is not prosecuted, and its killing our legal system. In the last few years only 1 case for perjury in the entire nation has been filed. We all know that a lot more poeple are lying under oath. You should also not lie to the authorities, we have a special sentance that you say in lue of lying "I want my lawyer" But these white collar criminals executives companies and even regular people that lie under oath need to get prosecuted. Justice is not served if the court is lyed to. And the courts will not become fair untill prosecuters start investigating, charging and convicting people for purjery. It is undermining our legal system
The reason colaboration software fails is the weakest link. It only takes one person on the team, or one asshole manager to not use the colaboration software, and its worthless and everyone reverts back to email. I've been through it we deploy a great system, everyone starts using it. One person refuses to use or learn the system starts emailing everyone. There information is suddenly no longer in the system. Everyone else gets tired of using the colab system and then emailing the information to the one person not using it. It becomes double entry everyone starts thinking its stupid and in less that 2 weeks its out the door and everyone is using email.
If people just paid for someone to set there computer up right they would avoid a lot of hastle. WinXP, free-av.com, Microsoft Spyware. IE disabled firefox and mozilla installed. Computer autologging into a restricted account and requiring a logout and login as admin to install software, hardware firewall between them and the broadband account.
They would pretty much not need much help after that. Its all these people that plug an open admin enabled computer up to a cable modem that get into trouble
If I am setting up a netgear or any other router and give it a password of course I write down the password and tape it to the bottom of the device. We are trying to keep other wireless users off of the network. If they can read the password off of the bottom of the basestation, then they are in your home and you probably do not mind them being on the network. As long as you can't see the password from outside the house then you are quite secure and if you forget the password its waiting for you.
I'd like to see them benchmark the 2003 IIS server against a stock OS X server. on equal machines, or as close to equal as possible. While sales people use stuff like this. A slightly slower but stable webserver will beat out whatever speed machine one can come up with. And we all know you can build multiple redundant unix servers for the cost of MS licensing.
I work where a lot of "smart building" technology has been implemented though its a school setting so the air handleing is not a critical as with a high rise building. What I found and what a lot of IT staff in smart building find. Is they are being put in charge of this stuff not because they are proficient with smart building systems but becuase it involves a computer so dump it on IT and save money. Companies look at a lot of this stuff as we no longer need a highly paid building systems guy we only need sub minimum wage janitors and IT will handle the Power, HVAC and so fourth because its computerized and thats what they do. A lot of the time this stuff is sold as a way to save money. And it does more efficient light use, HVAC savings by only powering up exactly what is needed for ocupied areas. But many times its also sold because in theory staff can be "condensed". I still like all the smart building stuff it can save money and make office conditions more comfortable and consistent.
We use a plastic vapor barier in home construction called HouseWrap. While wapp paper seems like a PITA since you need to do floors and ceilings if they made housewrap that could do vapor barier and be the wi-fi shield I'd toss it on my place. The ability to hit a wall switch and block cell phones would also be an advantage for say a dinner party where there is one moron who wants to talk on the phone all the time.