And apparently you think that one Cherokee group made up all the peoples of the Americas.
We don't even need to get into the realm of whether this was really the "first" writing system even for that group.
It's amusing when someone reads a few lines of aside in a book and thinks they're an expert...
Actually, by using that as a reference point, he certainly heavily implied it. Why would he use that example unless he thought it was original and worthy? I'm honestly curious. Wouldn't seem to make any sense.
There's a bit of a misunderstanding, let me clarify. I said:
That comic is a half-retarded rehash of years-old observations from people way smarter than the writers. Their few attempts at originality are too flat-out-stupid to be funny; they fail the old test of having a nugget of truth at the center to anchor the whole thing.
This is two separate things:
That comic is a half-retarded rehash of years-old observations from people way smarter than the writers.
Their few attempts at originality are too flat-out-stupid to be funny; they fail the old test of having a nugget of truth at the center to anchor the whole thing.
You can tell these are two separate things because they address mutually exclusive options. The general case, which is a rehash, and the exception, which are attempts at originality.
As I said, the current example falls into the first category. So no, I'm not saying that equation isn't true. I'm saying, "big deal. everyone has known this for a few centuries--there was anonymous writing before the Internet--and they didn't add anything at all to the basic summation of the thought."
Yes, because nobody ever, ever summed this up either seriously or amusingly before Penny Arcade.
That comic is a half-retarded rehash of years-old observations from people way smarter than the writers. Their few attempts at originality are too flat-out-stupid to be funny; they fail the old test of having a nugget of truth at the center to anchor the whole thing.
And that's something that the Communist psuedo-Libertarians never have quite worked out for themselves. (Probably because to be a truly dedicated Libertarian requires logical development stunted at a fifth grade level.)
When one person (or a soviet, or a board of directors) controls an industry it's bad news. For some reason they only think it's bad news if the person doing this has a government badge on. I'm not quite sure how they manage to resolve this in their heads. Central planning is central planning.
Ah. In that case, I have no idea. Don't use it, am not familiar with anyone who does. I do know that switching from one "we'll do everything you need!" solution to another rarely solves your problem, which is probably not in the implementation, but the concept.:) It may take a little more research, but at the end of the day, if you really don't have the resources to pull it together yourself, at least get your email from someone who understands email, and etc.
Once again, for anything but the absolute dead middle-of-the-road machine, Apple is cheaper than any Dell, HP, or etc. In the case of high-end machines up to $1000 cheaper--for better specs. Even PC mags have admitted this in studies in past months.
This "Macs are expensive thing" is from 1997 and just won't fly anymore.
Also, Apple tried uncoupling the OS from the hardware. Again, we're talking mid-late 90s and it was a failure.
Not only that, but the "entrenchment" of Exchange is grossly overstated in this forum--most likely a sample skew due to so many slashdotters being IT workers at smallish/mid-size non-technical workplaces. To be sure, the presence of Exchange in American business is weighty, but not overwhelming. I seriously doubt that it is significant barrier to Mac use in "business" environments--it is a symptom, not a cause. As you note, Macs are fine and even can flourish in such an environment.
This is a persistent bit of "common wisdom" which is mythical and needs to die. Macs slid off the radar for business decades before things like calendars and mobility mattered, and they do not have any functional inferiority in that space today.
The problem with this theory? All available evidence says it isn't remotely true.
Name two, just two, times that what you're claiming will happen, has happened in the past in an analogous situation. Remember, to be analogous it has to meet a number of criteria. Here are three of the most important:
1. A product or service that is completely interoperable with its competitors (ie, users of this service can send texts to their Verizon friends). 2. A product or service which sparked this eventual price war in a previously stable, or conglomerating, oligopoly. 3. A sector with extremely high barriers to entry, including government licenses that cost billions.
I bet you can't even name a single one. I'm going to ask for two, since one hardly establishes a pattern that we might consider extrapolating from.
That article didn't say anything about what the last setup actually was, only that it apparently took a lot of effort to keep running, and an attempt by ITS to blame that on Sun. Like I said, we use Sun hardware for 70k+ users, as do many, many other universities and businesses, and I've never heard of particular issues with it beyond the usual sorts of things. It certainly has fewer problems than any Exchange deployment I've known of. The article you linked to has all the hallmarks of a boneheaded puff piece, as is pointed out in the comments to it.
Any quota is not a low quota. "If one is set at all, it's with the expectation that it will be hit -- why else set it?" is basically nonsensical.
Your "lesson" didn't address or rebut any of my points. I'll give you the short version (hint: I'm basically agreeing with you on this part): Hard quotas on an inbox are dumb (for the reasons you stated among others), and nobody in higher education that I've come across lately is using them.
As for other storage, including IMAP folders, a quota is just fine--if the user has an academic or job-related need for more space, we give it to them. Making them ask puts a limit on people filling up infinite space with mp3s.:P We don't need to be in the business of storing *that* kind of data. By enforcing a quota, you do *not* make that choice. That claim is silly and nonsensical. You are making the user make that choice--they can keep their "real" data there and move their pictures of Anna somewhere else.
Directory information can be given to anyone - the University just has to have a policy saying under what circumstances it can be shared and with whom, and what constitutes directory information. FERPA requires that we have a policy - it does NOT dictate what that policy has to be.
Wrong. You cannot have a policy that course attendance is "directory information". There is a narrow type of information that can be considered directory info, and it is not a matter left to the University's discretion in the direction of inclusion. None of it can relate in any way to specific course enrollment, coursework or outcomes (other than honors designations and awards). Additionally, the University has no discretion on opt-out policy, which is mandatory and the opt-out a complete ban on standard directory info release.
Student email, stored on a system paid for or contracted for by the University are likely NOT student records - it's not grades. In fact, on a system belonging to the University, it's likely the property of the school.
Wrong on all counts.
It is quite explicit that "student records" encompasses anything relating to the student's studies, not just grades. Emails about classes are most definitely covered; personal emails on a school account are not. And unless a University claims such by policy (which I have not seen anywhere, probably because it would be exceedingly likely to defend it in court), that data is not the property of the University no matter who maintains the system on which it resides.
And, by the way, FERPA doesn't actually prohibit anyone working for the University who has any thin excuse to see the information from doing so, including consultants and contractors. Yes, the liability isn't transferred, but the authority is.
Wrong. FERPA enumerates the allowed uses and users of "student records" and while it's vague in some areas this isn't one of them. There is absolutely nothing that could be construed as allowing anyone not employed by either the institution or the government access to such records without signed approval of the student.
I also didn't say that enforcement action would be terribly likely, I said it was a possibility. It's been demonstrated, in these days of "ID theft" hysteria, that the feds are looking for whipping boys on this stuff and if some school were to have a breach involving giving out student info to a bunch of god-knows-whos who turn around and leak it or sell it, you can bet there would be enforcement forthcoming.
You also err in that, while SCOTUS has ruled that there is no right to private action under FERPA, FERPA is still quite a useful guideline as to the sort of release which is likely to be actionable on other bases. If a release is explicitly protected under FERPA, it's unlikely that it will be found to be a violation of any privacy contract between the student and the school, torts of defamation, or etc. For example, in the case in which SCOTUS ruled as noted above the plaintiff still walked away with nearly a million dollars under other statutes for the same release. Yes, in this case it's "not FERPA" as you said, but it's still quite a useful guideline for "here's where we're safe".
There are other problems with what you've written, but this is already long enough. Having said all this, I agree that there is a lot of misunderstanding, and overestimating, of FERPA. But it's certainly not something that should prudently be ignored, as you seem to suggest.
It's criminal, but my understanding was that the penalties are all institutional and financial; unlike HIPAA, there isn't any personal liability, jail time, etc involved. I might be wrong though.
The university I work for has over 70k active users. It delivers over three million messages a week and turns away four times that in spam.
We also run mostly free tools on Solaris hardware.
For all email services, including a pretty good webmail, a box for "premium" ie shell accounts, smtp, and an internal-only relay service, we use 21 machines. We provide and encourage IMAP, basically unlimited inbox and 2GB other storage (including IMAP folders).
It certainly isn't free by any means, but it's extremely reliable, open, and feature-rich. I'm not sure why it would take 50 servers for the type and scale of service you've described, unless they're older machines like X1s or 210s.
You are right that the university taking kickbacks to let corps pimp to their students is antithetical to everything university should be about, but sadly, that battle was lost long ago and will not be revisited. From credit-card giveaways to Aramark in the dining hall to Coke everywhere to MS license deals and their posters all over campus, it's over.
It's semi-likely, depending on details, that this sort of setup would end up in FERPA violations. Very little identifiable information related to student's education is allowed to be distributed to anyone, for any reason, except very narrow classes of University personnel as directly applicable to their jobs (eg, your advisor has to be able to look at your transcript).
The duty is the University's, and cannot be transferred via contract. So no matter what indemnities are in their agreement, if an MS employee reads an email between a professor and student, or even sees a subject line connecting a student to a particular course, the University is subject to very serious financial penalties. It seems like a very risky proposition.
You're wrong, and completely ignored the substance of his message. I think a drop-in MS "solution" is a terrible, terrible idea, but on the more general question of not allowing students to forward mail it absolutely saves money, for the reasons the gp listed which you completely failed to respond to. It's not the matter of changing the delivery destination. It's the matter of support, documentation, and repercussions.
I'm not sure if you're referring to the story, with its MS lock-in "solution", or to what I was talking about, which is the reasons for not allowing students to forward mail (or at least discouraging it).
If the former, I agree with you. If you're going to prevent students forwarding mail, you better offer them choice in how they handle it. But if you're talking about the general case as I was you're way off-base.
Not many colleges or universities have particularly low quotas anymore, and exceptionally few bounce mail when you hit such a quota. That's a terrible, moronic policy (I'm sure there are some small state and community schools that haven't gotten the memo yet, but they're the exception). And other than brain-dead joints that use MS or IBM "solutions" I haven't heard of anyplace that prevents a user from exporting and archiving mail on their own (many even offer special facilities for such).
Intersections with calendaring, directory services (which at some Universities is a large range of functions, many others haven't caught up to 1999 yet), file exchange. Different users have wildly different needs for storage, volume, for auto processing (both filtering and archiving). Etc, etc, etc.
It's much cheaper to outsource your email than to run your own servers.
A lot of people are attracted to this argument. It's usually false. There's a particular case where, given perfect conditions, it will save you money: you're a small institution, outsourcing to a business large enough to get economies of scale on hardware and expertise which you can't hope for on your own, yet not so large that they can treat you any way they like and nickel-and-dime you to death down the road.
In the vast, vast majority of cases, and this has been shown almost without exception over the last fifteen years in experiments from outsourcing email to privatizing railways, what happens is the contractor ends up being more-or-less unaccountable (due to many factors) and costs a good deal more. There's the glaringly obvious that people always forget: when you outsource you may not even save any money on the 1:1 comparison, and on top of that you have to pay the contractor's profit margin! They're not doing it for free.
People overstate the extent to which email is a commodity service, especially when it involves large operations that are either extremely specialized or extremely heterogenous (as most universities are). When there are tens of thousands of people working in vastly different matters, a one-size-fits-all solution is rarely adequate. This is why so many people who are forced to use it (ie, not top-level execs who have secretaries to use it for them) hate the good old Exchange/Outlook environment. You have to adjust to how it wants you to work, no matter how inappropriate or plainly broken it is.
All of your replies make it obvious that you have no idea how a University (or probably any organization of over ten members) functions. No offense. You may be a frustrated student, which I can understand. I sounded similar once upon a time.
Here's the deal: the IT department is *exceedingly* unlikely to be the source of the "can't forward email" policy. I work for one of the five largest Universities in the States. I can tell you that nothing like that would ever come from the IT department. Ever. It would come from people like a VP or Provost who oversees the admissions and/or fundraising process. Why? They want to be able to conduct all business, from admissions/housing/financial aid when you come in, to begging you to become a contributor when you leave, as cheaply as possible. This means e-mail and it means forcing you to use theirs so that you can't say, "oh, Hotmail must've eaten it!" or "You sent it to the wrong address!" You have one address, and you are responsible for it, period.
It comes from way over the IT people's heads, and they may even hate it.
Slashdot Mirror
And apparently you think that one Cherokee group made up all the peoples of the Americas. We don't even need to get into the realm of whether this was really the "first" writing system even for that group. It's amusing when someone reads a few lines of aside in a book and thinks they're an expert...
That's okay. I struggled with English when I was ten, too. You'll get past it.
Actually, by using that as a reference point, he certainly heavily implied it. Why would he use that example unless he thought it was original and worthy? I'm honestly curious. Wouldn't seem to make any sense.
Speaking of cowards... mr AC....
There's a bit of a misunderstanding, let me clarify. I said:
That comic is a half-retarded rehash of years-old observations from people way smarter than the writers. Their few attempts at originality are too flat-out-stupid to be funny; they fail the old test of having a nugget of truth at the center to anchor the whole thing.
This is two separate things:
You can tell these are two separate things because they address mutually exclusive options. The general case, which is a rehash, and the exception, which are attempts at originality.
As I said, the current example falls into the first category. So no, I'm not saying that equation isn't true. I'm saying, "big deal. everyone has known this for a few centuries--there was anonymous writing before the Internet--and they didn't add anything at all to the basic summation of the thought."
Hope that's clearer...
Yes, because nobody ever, ever summed this up either seriously or amusingly before Penny Arcade.
That comic is a half-retarded rehash of years-old observations from people way smarter than the writers. Their few attempts at originality are too flat-out-stupid to be funny; they fail the old test of having a nugget of truth at the center to anchor the whole thing.
And that's something that the Communist psuedo-Libertarians never have quite worked out for themselves. (Probably because to be a truly dedicated Libertarian requires logical development stunted at a fifth grade level.)
When one person (or a soviet, or a board of directors) controls an industry it's bad news. For some reason they only think it's bad news if the person doing this has a government badge on. I'm not quite sure how they manage to resolve this in their heads. Central planning is central planning.
Ah. In that case, I have no idea. Don't use it, am not familiar with anyone who does. I do know that switching from one "we'll do everything you need!" solution to another rarely solves your problem, which is probably not in the implementation, but the concept. :) It may take a little more research, but at the end of the day, if you really don't have the resources to pull it together yourself, at least get your email from someone who understands email, and etc.
Once again, for anything but the absolute dead middle-of-the-road machine, Apple is cheaper than any Dell, HP, or etc. In the case of high-end machines up to $1000 cheaper--for better specs. Even PC mags have admitted this in studies in past months.
This "Macs are expensive thing" is from 1997 and just won't fly anymore.
Also, Apple tried uncoupling the OS from the hardware. Again, we're talking mid-late 90s and it was a failure.
Where have you been for the last ten years?
Not only that, but the "entrenchment" of Exchange is grossly overstated in this forum--most likely a sample skew due to so many slashdotters being IT workers at smallish/mid-size non-technical workplaces. To be sure, the presence of Exchange in American business is weighty, but not overwhelming. I seriously doubt that it is significant barrier to Mac use in "business" environments--it is a symptom, not a cause. As you note, Macs are fine and even can flourish in such an environment.
This is a persistent bit of "common wisdom" which is mythical and needs to die. Macs slid off the radar for business decades before things like calendars and mobility mattered, and they do not have any functional inferiority in that space today.
Wrong and wrong, as far as I can tell, but I'll give you a chance to explain your assertion and enlighten me.
(Hint: prices on wired broadband ISPs--dialup is not analogous--have not decreased so that doesn't even remotely begin to support the case.)
The problem with this theory? All available evidence says it isn't remotely true.
Name two, just two, times that what you're claiming will happen, has happened in the past in an analogous situation. Remember, to be analogous it has to meet a number of criteria. Here are three of the most important:
1. A product or service that is completely interoperable with its competitors (ie, users of this service can send texts to their Verizon friends).
2. A product or service which sparked this eventual price war in a previously stable, or conglomerating, oligopoly.
3. A sector with extremely high barriers to entry, including government licenses that cost billions.
I bet you can't even name a single one. I'm going to ask for two, since one hardly establishes a pattern that we might consider extrapolating from.
That article didn't say anything about what the last setup actually was, only that it apparently took a lot of effort to keep running, and an attempt by ITS to blame that on Sun. Like I said, we use Sun hardware for 70k+ users, as do many, many other universities and businesses, and I've never heard of particular issues with it beyond the usual sorts of things. It certainly has fewer problems than any Exchange deployment I've known of. The article you linked to has all the hallmarks of a boneheaded puff piece, as is pointed out in the comments to it.
Any quota is not a low quota. "If one is set at all, it's with the expectation that it will be hit -- why else set it?" is basically nonsensical.
:P We don't need to be in the business of storing *that* kind of data. By enforcing a quota, you do *not* make that choice. That claim is silly and nonsensical. You are making the user make that choice--they can keep their "real" data there and move their pictures of Anna somewhere else.
Your "lesson" didn't address or rebut any of my points. I'll give you the short version (hint: I'm basically agreeing with you on this part): Hard quotas on an inbox are dumb (for the reasons you stated among others), and nobody in higher education that I've come across lately is using them.
As for other storage, including IMAP folders, a quota is just fine--if the user has an academic or job-related need for more space, we give it to them. Making them ask puts a limit on people filling up infinite space with mp3s.
Ah, gotcha. Makes more sense.
Directory information can be given to anyone - the University just has to have a policy saying under what circumstances it can be shared and with whom, and what constitutes directory information. FERPA requires that we have a policy - it does NOT dictate what that policy has to be.
Wrong. You cannot have a policy that course attendance is "directory information". There is a narrow type of information that can be considered directory info, and it is not a matter left to the University's discretion in the direction of inclusion. None of it can relate in any way to specific course enrollment, coursework or outcomes (other than honors designations and awards). Additionally, the University has no discretion on opt-out policy, which is mandatory and the opt-out a complete ban on standard directory info release.
Student email, stored on a system paid for or contracted for by the University are likely NOT student records - it's not grades. In fact, on a system belonging to the University, it's likely the property of the school.
Wrong on all counts.
It is quite explicit that "student records" encompasses anything relating to the student's studies, not just grades. Emails about classes are most definitely covered; personal emails on a school account are not. And unless a University claims such by policy (which I have not seen anywhere, probably because it would be exceedingly likely to defend it in court), that data is not the property of the University no matter who maintains the system on which it resides.
And, by the way, FERPA doesn't actually prohibit anyone working for the University who has any thin excuse to see the information from doing so, including consultants and contractors. Yes, the liability isn't transferred, but the authority is.
Wrong. FERPA enumerates the allowed uses and users of "student records" and while it's vague in some areas this isn't one of them. There is absolutely nothing that could be construed as allowing anyone not employed by either the institution or the government access to such records without signed approval of the student.
I also didn't say that enforcement action would be terribly likely, I said it was a possibility. It's been demonstrated, in these days of "ID theft" hysteria, that the feds are looking for whipping boys on this stuff and if some school were to have a breach involving giving out student info to a bunch of god-knows-whos who turn around and leak it or sell it, you can bet there would be enforcement forthcoming.
You also err in that, while SCOTUS has ruled that there is no right to private action under FERPA, FERPA is still quite a useful guideline as to the sort of release which is likely to be actionable on other bases. If a release is explicitly protected under FERPA, it's unlikely that it will be found to be a violation of any privacy contract between the student and the school, torts of defamation, or etc. For example, in the case in which SCOTUS ruled as noted above the plaintiff still walked away with nearly a million dollars under other statutes for the same release. Yes, in this case it's "not FERPA" as you said, but it's still quite a useful guideline for "here's where we're safe".
There are other problems with what you've written, but this is already long enough. Having said all this, I agree that there is a lot of misunderstanding, and overestimating, of FERPA. But it's certainly not something that should prudently be ignored, as you seem to suggest.
It's criminal, but my understanding was that the penalties are all institutional and financial; unlike HIPAA, there isn't any personal liability, jail time, etc involved. I might be wrong though.
The university I work for has over 70k active users. It delivers over three million messages a week and turns away four times that in spam.
We also run mostly free tools on Solaris hardware.
For all email services, including a pretty good webmail, a box for "premium" ie shell accounts, smtp, and an internal-only relay service, we use 21 machines. We provide and encourage IMAP, basically unlimited inbox and 2GB other storage (including IMAP folders).
It certainly isn't free by any means, but it's extremely reliable, open, and feature-rich. I'm not sure why it would take 50 servers for the type and scale of service you've described, unless they're older machines like X1s or 210s.
You are right that the university taking kickbacks to let corps pimp to their students is antithetical to everything university should be about, but sadly, that battle was lost long ago and will not be revisited. From credit-card giveaways to Aramark in the dining hall to Coke everywhere to MS license deals and their posters all over campus, it's over.
It's semi-likely, depending on details, that this sort of setup would end up in FERPA violations. Very little identifiable information related to student's education is allowed to be distributed to anyone, for any reason, except very narrow classes of University personnel as directly applicable to their jobs (eg, your advisor has to be able to look at your transcript). The duty is the University's, and cannot be transferred via contract. So no matter what indemnities are in their agreement, if an MS employee reads an email between a professor and student, or even sees a subject line connecting a student to a particular course, the University is subject to very serious financial penalties. It seems like a very risky proposition.
You're wrong, and completely ignored the substance of his message. I think a drop-in MS "solution" is a terrible, terrible idea, but on the more general question of not allowing students to forward mail it absolutely saves money, for the reasons the gp listed which you completely failed to respond to. It's not the matter of changing the delivery destination. It's the matter of support, documentation, and repercussions.
I'm not sure if you're referring to the story, with its MS lock-in "solution", or to what I was talking about, which is the reasons for not allowing students to forward mail (or at least discouraging it).
If the former, I agree with you. If you're going to prevent students forwarding mail, you better offer them choice in how they handle it. But if you're talking about the general case as I was you're way off-base.
Not many colleges or universities have particularly low quotas anymore, and exceptionally few bounce mail when you hit such a quota. That's a terrible, moronic policy (I'm sure there are some small state and community schools that haven't gotten the memo yet, but they're the exception). And other than brain-dead joints that use MS or IBM "solutions" I haven't heard of anyplace that prevents a user from exporting and archiving mail on their own (many even offer special facilities for such).
Intersections with calendaring, directory services (which at some Universities is a large range of functions, many others haven't caught up to 1999 yet), file exchange. Different users have wildly different needs for storage, volume, for auto processing (both filtering and archiving). Etc, etc, etc.
It's much cheaper to outsource your email than to run your own servers.
A lot of people are attracted to this argument. It's usually false. There's a particular case where, given perfect conditions, it will save you money: you're a small institution, outsourcing to a business large enough to get economies of scale on hardware and expertise which you can't hope for on your own, yet not so large that they can treat you any way they like and nickel-and-dime you to death down the road.
In the vast, vast majority of cases, and this has been shown almost without exception over the last fifteen years in experiments from outsourcing email to privatizing railways, what happens is the contractor ends up being more-or-less unaccountable (due to many factors) and costs a good deal more. There's the glaringly obvious that people always forget: when you outsource you may not even save any money on the 1:1 comparison, and on top of that you have to pay the contractor's profit margin! They're not doing it for free.
People overstate the extent to which email is a commodity service, especially when it involves large operations that are either extremely specialized or extremely heterogenous (as most universities are). When there are tens of thousands of people working in vastly different matters, a one-size-fits-all solution is rarely adequate. This is why so many people who are forced to use it (ie, not top-level execs who have secretaries to use it for them) hate the good old Exchange/Outlook environment. You have to adjust to how it wants you to work, no matter how inappropriate or plainly broken it is.
All of your replies make it obvious that you have no idea how a University (or probably any organization of over ten members) functions. No offense. You may be a frustrated student, which I can understand. I sounded similar once upon a time. Here's the deal: the IT department is *exceedingly* unlikely to be the source of the "can't forward email" policy. I work for one of the five largest Universities in the States. I can tell you that nothing like that would ever come from the IT department. Ever. It would come from people like a VP or Provost who oversees the admissions and/or fundraising process. Why? They want to be able to conduct all business, from admissions/housing/financial aid when you come in, to begging you to become a contributor when you leave, as cheaply as possible. This means e-mail and it means forcing you to use theirs so that you can't say, "oh, Hotmail must've eaten it!" or "You sent it to the wrong address!" You have one address, and you are responsible for it, period. It comes from way over the IT people's heads, and they may even hate it.