One view is that prisons are "banishment" as you describe. The purpose of prison is, in theory, to simply separate the criminal from the rest of society with the primary goal of protecting the society from the criminal. No attempt is made to change the criminal in any significant way. This is the European model.
Uhh, no it isn't. The European model combines detention with rehabilitation. The idea is that you keep the prisoner away from society both to protect society during his incarceration, and to punish the inmate by taking away his liberty.
You then also use that time to try and solve the problems that caused the prisoner to commit his crimes in the first place. Many property criminals are so because of poverty and/or illiteracy. Crimes of violence are sometimes due to treatable mental illnesses. Training in usable skills and therapy are used to help the criminals have at least a chance of making it outside without resorting to further criminality; especially given they may get parole for the last third or so of their sentence. This system doesn't always work, and it's often not as well funded as it should be, especially in overcrowded institutions. But it's better than the alternative -
the american federal system; chuck them in a cage for a few years, treat them like a rabid dog, abuse the hell out of them, and then chuck these broken men back out into society and assume that they will not commit any more crimes due to fear of going back. Ignore that they have no legitimate work skills, few people skills, are virtually unemployable, are barely eligable for state help and have no vote to try and get better representation - and overall have no visible method of supporting themselves except by going back to committing crimes.
Large companies often sponsor things for the 'public good' because of the positive PR and advertising they get out of it.
Brand building is a subtle art. If you end up buying a particular brand later because it's more familiar compared to the alternatives, even if you can't remember anything about the company behind the brand, or why it rings a bell; then the marketers have done their job.
By threatening to withdraw XP from OEM sale entirely (and we've another deadline next month, I believe) they've pushed many OEMs to switch their product line entirely to vista, despite strong demand for XP from their actual customers.
By withdrawing XP they've made OEMs switch to using downgrade rights on vista instead; Vista Home Premium and Vista Ultimate are the only versions of vista with downgrade rights (to xp pro) in the licence, so home premium (the rough equivalent of xp home, price wise) cannot be downgraded to xp home.
The OEM licence programs costs are often mostly the 'upgrade' cost to vista business rather than the XP side of things; something that could have been entirely avoided if microsoft had allowed dowgrade rights in vista home premium too, or even just kept selling XP.
We have all our cable in conduit. We still lost 3 older external and one internal fibre-run to rats coming off the fields in search of food and getting inside the ducting, and then chewing through the cable on the way to someplace else. You'd be *amazed* the size holes they can squeeze through - basically anything it can get its head through.
These days all our fibre runs longer than a patch lead are steel-taped cable. Much less flexible, and you need a good hacksaw to cut it. Still, try chewing through the armoured stuff, you sneaky little buggers.
Even more so, it's about the width of the body and the natual position of the free hand.
A leftie with his left hand on the mouse, to the left of the keyboard; his right hand naturally falls around the arrow keys or numberpad.
A rightie with his right hand on the mouse to the right side of the keyboard will naturally have his left hand fall around the wasd and 1234 side of the keyboard.
While it's certainly possible to mouse left-handed and use wasd for gaming, (or the keypad if you're a rightie) you end up reaching across your body quite a lot. It's a natural stretch to assume keypad based password entry will be more common amongst lefties.
Indeed - by setting up a transmitter of significant wattage, you're depriving everybody else in the public the use of that particular frequency. You're only one member of the public, and the rest of us get to have consideration too. Try looking up the 'tragedy of the commons' sometime.
You get to use the frequency exclusively by paying the licence fee, thus compensating the rest of the public for their loss. That money goes back to the government, and ultimately (at least in principle) benefits all the public - including yourself. Yes, you get back much less than you put in as an individual; but with exclusive use of the frequency, the benefit you get is that much higher also.
Somewhere along the way the government decided that television is a right and not a privilege.
Because the public still owns the right to the airwaves. The TV companies are leasing the public's property, as negotiated by the government.
By switching to digital transmission, significant amount of spectrum are freed up for other wireless purposes. Quite a bit of this spectrum is already leased out to new users once it's freed up. The government gets quite a bit of money out of this, on behalf of the public.
Given the incovenience caused by this change in use, and the profit made by doing so, it's hardly unreasonable for the government to give some small amount of the profit made back to the public to mitigate the impact of the change.
But yes, it does not seem right that having bought, for example a book, you can then find yourself subject by opening its packaging, to a clause which says you may not read it in the bath. Or that when you take home a drill, you will find you have assented to a contract where you undertake not to use it in way of trade.
The doctrine of first sale came about precisely because book copyright holders tried to enforce additional restrictions post-sale (you may not resell this book).
The basic rule is this, with copyrighted works: Once a copy of the copyrighted work is sold, the copyright owner can extend no further restrictions upon the use or resale of the work, other than those already included in copyright law. Adding a EULA that you don't see or agree until after the sale is completed simply isn't valid under doctrine of first sale. This excludes UCITA states, where they have a specific law making EULAs valid contracts, even applied post sale.
Software companies try to get round this by claiming that by installing the software to the harddrive or even into the memory for operation, you are making an illegal copy that requires their permission every time you install or run the program; and their permission hinges upon acceptance of the EULA, whether you installed it or not.
I don't know about the US in this case, but in the UK, copyright explicitly states you're allowed to make any copies required in order to operate the software in the normal manner., so EULAs fall back under doctrine of first sale, and are thus unenforcable.
This excluded business contracts conducted prior to sale, or licences for ongoing services - the xbox live EULA is likely generally valid, like a mobile phone contract, because there's an ongoing consideration/service in exchange for your acceptance.
It's also worth pointing out that the senior case regarding this in the US, procd vs Zeidenberg in 1996, did regard EULAs as valid contracts; possible because the information within (phone listings) wasn't covered by copyright law, as bare facts are not copyrightable.
With any luck, this exception to normal doctrine of first sale will be overturned in the US by the supreme court. in the UK though, I'm not aware of any court case finding EULAs valid outside of pre-existing business contracts/bulk licence agreements.
It's a bit like Citrix ICA, but it's designed to hook onto a full virtualised desktop on the backend. You don't just get a thin-client desktop to play with, you get an entire hosted virtual PC all to yourself. Obviously the hardware load on your infrastructure + ESX servers is that much more than terminal server/citrix, and it's still a very new product. As you say, the enterprise backend is pretty expensive, while the client can now be stuck in anything and everything, including thin terminals.
VDI (virtual desktop infrastructure) is their old name for this, they've now put it under the Vmware View name.
Vmware ESXi - free, cut down version of ESX, very new. bare-metal hypervisor (so you need to dedicate an entire physical server to it), and you manage it much like ESX, though you need to pay to combine multiple ESXi servers together under one management screen. Rather similar in principle to vmware server; depends whether you want the host OS to also do other things, or just give the entire box over to ESXi (which is quicker and more robust)
* VMware Fusion - desktop virtualization on macs, also allows you to run individual windows apps but they appear as a window on your OSX desktop. Not free.
* VMware server - free virtual server hosting setup. Fairly basic, but allows you to run multiple OSes on a single physical server and linux or windows host OS, and have them provide services on the network - or RDP/VNC into them and use them for testing, etc.
* VMware workstation - similar to vmware fusion, but for linux/windows, and without the 'open an app as a native window' feature. Not free. Designed to create and snapshot multiple vms on your own desktop.
* VMware view - virtual desktops. You give your users their own personal desktop image, but it's stored on your ESX servers, not their local hard-drive. A bit like thin clients, but you virtualise the entire pc, not just the desktop. they break it with a virus? Spin them a new one off the spare pool, or bring their old one back from backup snapshot. Or just have a standard pool, and hand them out automatically as needed. Vmware view is the clientside app that lets them connect to their virtual desktop, but since all the virtualisation work is done serverside, the client can be low-power.
* VMware ESX - enterprise grade virtualisation server. Combined with vmware infrastructure, you run a bare minimum hypervisor (no overhead from a standard linux or windows OS host), store your virtual machines on a SAN or NFS, have a pool of physical servers and automatically load-balance your VMs between them or even bring them back up automatically if a physical server goes bang. Nearly completely abstract your servers from the hardware, run 20 servers per actual piece of tin. Very much not free.
* VMware Player - free basic app that lets you run VMs on your desktop, but not create them. Largely superceded by vmware server (now free) except for specific uses.
* VMware ACE - packaged VMs. You create a VM with workstation, send it out, then they run the ACE package on their local PC, with a VM OS + app setup inside it. Allows you to have a standardised VM available on your desktop machines, without all the overhead of ESX, SAN, network etc, but your desktops need to be grunty.
Wheras now, they're just going to log everything, at the ISPs expense, and copy it to a giant government database where it'll be available for fishing expedition by lots of different government bodies; police, security services, revenue and customs, local councils investigating littering...
They should release at maximum, 3 versions. Home, Professional, and Ultimate.
Perhaps they'd be better off calling them Windows 7 Budget (home) and Windows 7 I'm Not Cheap (professional) Windows 7 Ludicrously Overpriced And I Like It Because That Means It Must Be Good (Enterprise)
But it would be just as easy to make the options well, optional at install with the option of adding them in later - aka similar to the choice of simplified installation package collections you get when you install most distros.
Forcing you to choose between media centre (home premium) and remote desktop (business), for example, unless you buy the uber-expensive ultimate option is just designed to extract as much money from the market, via segmentation, as possible; it's a cynical move that harms their customers.
I've put windows 7 public beta on my eee 901. It's a bit of a tight fit on the 4GB SSD, so I had to move the programs folder and user settings across to the 2ndary 8GB SSD and hard-link, but it runs pretty nicely indeed with Aero, on the 945 chipset. A hell of a lot better than vista.
I haven't benched it yet, but subjectively it runs the same or faster as XP in user-responsiveness. I did try ubuntu and easypeasy on it too, but the startup and launch hit from putting/usr on the slower 8GB was too much, so I'll stick to keeping ubuntu on my full-fat desktops for now.
1) Teacher workstation in each room, with projector and an "Elmo."
2) Computer labs, with thin or fat clients, depending on your needs.
3) Laptop carts, so individual classes can use a set of laptops if needed.
This is the setup I would go for. We have a very similar setup in a private school of about 600 pupils. We have 4 large fixed labs (25+) which any department can use for individual lessons, including internet based classes such as ECDL and some learning support based material. Each department also has at least one mini-lab of up to 12 computers used for individual lessons.
The individual teacher workstations plus projector, active whiteboard and dvd/vhs player + audio are probably the most effective IT in the school. We also have them in the lecture halls, for larger presentations.
There is also one laptop cart for roving use, and we're likely to get another soon. Thin clients are fine for light-use areas, and thick clients for areas such as DT, MFL and IT. Don't forget you're going to need a beefy wifi infrastructure to support significant numbers of laptops; something like aruba, rather than a horde of crappy individual waps.
There are two main issues. Training, and support. Without sufficient ongoing IT in education training for the teaching staff, ANY resources you put in will be underused. Equally, you MUST have sufficient IT staff to keep the labs running and the teacher whiteboard machines operational in short order, in addition to your central systems and servers staff. Keep the machines locked down tight, and use central software deployment and a quick imaging system to keep downtime to a minimum, or thin clients for the same reasons.
Individual personal laptops/netbooks for the students will significantly increase your overheads in terms of both infrastructure and support. Most of our students have their own laptops for things like homework, but they're not integrated into lessons, given the likelyhood of them having viruses, dodgy software and the students using them to goof off in lessons. It can work for older students (6th form), but it will be a massive headache in actually trying to teach with non-school controlled laptops in the lower years.
Server wise, I can strongly recommend a virtualised solution (we use vmware esx + SAN, but xen + management tools such as citrix also works). Don't forget to build your switch fabric robust enough for growth, including easy vlan management and layer 3 routing where needed. vlan'ing your teacher pcs away from curriculum pcs, and wireless laptops vlan'd away from everything else is hopefully a no brainer.
All very valid points - but do his self-admitted offences deserve 70 years in jail, or even 'see him fry' in New Jersey? As opposed to the 2-3 years he faces if convicted in a British Court?
The law is about justice, not just punishment. I don't think his offences justify a death sentence, either one threatend by the US government, or from his own hand in fear of what they've threatened him with.
McKinnon is trying to be tried in the UK, where he'd face 2-3 years in prison. He's already admitted he broke into the computers looking for alien evidence.
If he's successfully extradited to the US, he faces 70 years in jail. This case also show the unfairness of the extradition system between the UK and US. The UK changed its system so that people accused of serious offences could be extradited without any need to show the evidence against the accused to a British court, to speed up the process. The US was supposed to change their process similiarly, but have since sat on it, yet another example of Britain doing what the US wants and getting shit in return.
So far, they've used the new process to extradite people such as the natwest 3, who, while since found guilty, are british and committed their crimes in the UK while working for a UK company. And of course, extraditing McKinnon with no need to show probable cause.
Many people here in the UK feel that while he may indeed be due some punishment in the UK for what he's admitted doing, the US government is effectively using him as a scapegoat for their failings; that this is about hugely over-proportionate revenge rather than justice.
According to this analysis, the writers anticipated the daily domain-generation algorithm it uses to check for updates being reverse engineered, and they put in additional protection so that it would only download code from the original authors - presumably using some kind of key signing.
It's cheaper than that; server 2008 licences for education are about £95 a pop, plus CAL's of course. Handy when you're also building a VMware based setup.
We're a school going the other way - we were running a mixture of NT4 and linux servers, glued together with samba and ldap, including redhat directory server, and finally got the money and the time to upgrade.
I have to say, when you're using windows desktop clients (pretty much mandatory because of windows-only educational software), active directory is a hell of a lot easier to manage and support. We actually went with AD on server 2008 because management want Exchange+outlook for the teaching staff (integration into other software, shared calendaring etc), instead of our current dovecot/squirrelmail solution.
Linux will definitely still have a place on the backend, but it makes a lot more sense to have samba tied into AD, rather than the other way around. Sure, it costs more, but the amount of MY time it will save by not being the only guy who can do anything with the servers will be pretty hefty.
The key thing to remember when working with people like this is that they have a different way of working with their computer. They might use a computer for the entirety of their working day, but they never actually learn how to use it at all.
What they do is memorise tasks that achieve specific goals. To you and me, we learn how to do an abstract process - like how email works - then adapt that process to fit to whatever we're doing at the time. If we want to do something we haven't done before, we use our standard process of looking it up on google or the help files, and follow the instructions. If we want to find and submit an RMA form, we think 'ah, that's a document. I'll edit and print that in word.' You open word, open the document, then print it to your closest printer, having learned the general process for each - or at least how to look it up. Using a different version or a different printer doesn't phase us, because we know what we're looking for, and just browse around till we find what microsoft called the action this time round.
For them though, they never learn, or want to learn the process. As you say, it's a magic black box. They don't know it's word. They barely know it's a document. What they DO know is that, when they were shown how to do it on the PC they inherited from their predecessor, when they want to process an RMA request they go to the 4th icon along, 2 down on the 'screensaver' and double click. They then go here, here and here and write this and that bit of information in. They then go to the bar at the top, click the big round button, and select the 4th option down, and click the 2nd option. And the piece of paper comes out the printer.
Then their computer breaks. They can't click the 4th icon along, 2nd down any more because the screen is all black. They ring tech support to tell them they can't process RMA forms right now, and they need to do one really urgently, and get a load of gibberish questions about what version of office they're using, and is it in their documents thingie, and can they open it on their neighbours PC or whatever, and what they WANT is someone to come out and fix it, right now, so they can send off this RMA form like usual that the manager told them to send off urgently. What they get is a new computer, and now NOTHING is where it should be. How can I work like this? where's my H: drive button gone? How can I possibly do RMA forms when it's not ANYWHERE on my screensaver?
My solution? Wait for them all to die and be replaced by their children.
mp3 players might have been drab before the iPod, but they were certainly far from useless. I had two different sd-card based mp3 players years before the iPod launched, and they both worked perfectly well for playing mp3s I ripped from my CD collection.
I think penny-arcade said it best when the iPod first launched.
as for the iPhone... has it got cut and paste yet? Can I use it with a carrier of my choice without having to break the DRM, or avoid pay through the nose for the data plan? Can I download and install my own apps? Or is it just a pretty, expensive, show-off chunk of easily scratched plastic?
There were plenty of great phones out before the iPhone, and there'll be plenty after it - just look at the stuff you can get outside the US.
You think that's bad. In the UK, they take your prints and DNA when you're arrested, and then store them permanently, regardless of conviction or even if it goes to trial. They keep the DNA of people who volunteered it in community testing to eliminate themselves from enquiry, having been promised it would be destroyed. It wasn't. The police even have the DNA of hundreds of young children, via various means.
The government recently lost a case in the European Courts over keeping DNA records of innocent people indefinitely, but they show no signs of changing the practice.
It's worse than that. You don't even have to have been convicted of a crime, merely arrested to be excluded from the visa waiver program - which means applying via an expensive process with a 6 week or longer wait to get it, with no guarantee it'll be granted.
Simply for being *arrested for questioning* at any point in your life.
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One view is that prisons are "banishment" as you describe. The purpose of prison is, in theory, to simply separate the criminal from the rest of society with the primary goal of protecting the society from the criminal. No attempt is made to change the criminal in any significant way. This is the European model.
Uhh, no it isn't. The European model combines detention with rehabilitation. The idea is that you keep the prisoner away from society both to protect society during his incarceration, and to punish the inmate by taking away his liberty.
You then also use that time to try and solve the problems that caused the prisoner to commit his crimes in the first place. Many property criminals are so because of poverty and/or illiteracy. Crimes of violence are sometimes due to treatable mental illnesses. Training in usable skills and therapy are used to help the criminals have at least a chance of making it outside without resorting to further criminality; especially given they may get parole for the last third or so of their sentence. This system doesn't always work, and it's often not as well funded as it should be, especially in overcrowded institutions. But it's better than the alternative -
the american federal system; chuck them in a cage for a few years, treat them like a rabid dog, abuse the hell out of them, and then chuck these broken men back out into society and assume that they will not commit any more crimes due to fear of going back. Ignore that they have no legitimate work skills, few people skills, are virtually unemployable, are barely eligable for state help and have no vote to try and get better representation - and overall have no visible method of supporting themselves except by going back to committing crimes.
Large companies often sponsor things for the 'public good' because of the positive PR and advertising they get out of it.
Brand building is a subtle art. If you end up buying a particular brand later because it's more familiar compared to the alternatives, even if you can't remember anything about the company behind the brand, or why it rings a bell; then the marketers have done their job.
Depends upon your view of civil rights. When I hear jail breaking, I think of something like the storming of the Bastille.
By threatening to withdraw XP from OEM sale entirely (and we've another deadline next month, I believe) they've pushed many OEMs to switch their product line entirely to vista, despite strong demand for XP from their actual customers.
By withdrawing XP they've made OEMs switch to using downgrade rights on vista instead; Vista Home Premium and Vista Ultimate are the only versions of vista with downgrade rights (to xp pro) in the licence, so home premium (the rough equivalent of xp home, price wise) cannot be downgraded to xp home.
The OEM licence programs costs are often mostly the 'upgrade' cost to vista business rather than the XP side of things; something that could have been entirely avoided if microsoft had allowed dowgrade rights in vista home premium too, or even just kept selling XP.
We have all our cable in conduit. We still lost 3 older external and one internal fibre-run to rats coming off the fields in search of food and getting inside the ducting, and then chewing through the cable on the way to someplace else. You'd be *amazed* the size holes they can squeeze through - basically anything it can get its head through.
These days all our fibre runs longer than a patch lead are steel-taped cable. Much less flexible, and you need a good hacksaw to cut it. Still, try chewing through the armoured stuff, you sneaky little buggers.
Even more so, it's about the width of the body and the natual position of the free hand.
A leftie with his left hand on the mouse, to the left of the keyboard; his right hand naturally falls around the arrow keys or numberpad.
A rightie with his right hand on the mouse to the right side of the keyboard will naturally have his left hand fall around the wasd and 1234 side of the keyboard.
While it's certainly possible to mouse left-handed and use wasd for gaming, (or the keypad if you're a rightie) you end up reaching across your body quite a lot. It's a natural stretch to assume keypad based password entry will be more common amongst lefties.
Indeed - by setting up a transmitter of significant wattage, you're depriving everybody else in the public the use of that particular frequency. You're only one member of the public, and the rest of us get to have consideration too. Try looking up the 'tragedy of the commons' sometime.
You get to use the frequency exclusively by paying the licence fee, thus compensating the rest of the public for their loss. That money goes back to the government, and ultimately (at least in principle) benefits all the public - including yourself. Yes, you get back much less than you put in as an individual; but with exclusive use of the frequency, the benefit you get is that much higher also.
Somewhere along the way the government decided that television is a right and not a privilege.
Because the public still owns the right to the airwaves. The TV companies are leasing the public's property, as negotiated by the government.
By switching to digital transmission, significant amount of spectrum are freed up for other wireless purposes. Quite a bit of this spectrum is already leased out to new users once it's freed up. The government gets quite a bit of money out of this, on behalf of the public.
Given the incovenience caused by this change in use, and the profit made by doing so, it's hardly unreasonable for the government to give some small amount of the profit made back to the public to mitigate the impact of the change.
But yes, it does not seem right that having bought, for example a book, you can then find yourself subject by opening its packaging, to a clause which says you may not read it in the bath. Or that when you take home a drill, you will find you have assented to a contract where you undertake not to use it in way of trade.
The doctrine of first sale came about precisely because book copyright holders tried to enforce additional restrictions post-sale (you may not resell this book).
The basic rule is this, with copyrighted works:
Once a copy of the copyrighted work is sold, the copyright owner can extend no further restrictions upon the use or resale of the work, other than those already included in copyright law. Adding a EULA that you don't see or agree until after the sale is completed simply isn't valid under doctrine of first sale. This excludes UCITA states, where they have a specific law making EULAs valid contracts, even applied post sale.
Software companies try to get round this by claiming that by installing the software to the harddrive or even into the memory for operation, you are making an illegal copy that requires their permission every time you install or run the program; and their permission hinges upon acceptance of the EULA, whether you installed it or not.
I don't know about the US in this case, but in the UK, copyright explicitly states you're allowed to make any copies required in order to operate the software in the normal manner., so EULAs fall back under doctrine of first sale, and are thus unenforcable.
This excluded business contracts conducted prior to sale, or licences for ongoing services - the xbox live EULA is likely generally valid, like a mobile phone contract, because there's an ongoing consideration/service in exchange for your acceptance.
It's also worth pointing out that the senior case regarding this in the US, procd vs Zeidenberg in 1996, did regard EULAs as valid contracts; possible because the information within (phone listings) wasn't covered by copyright law, as bare facts are not copyrightable.
With any luck, this exception to normal doctrine of first sale will be overturned in the US by the supreme court. in the UK though, I'm not aware of any court case finding EULAs valid outside of pre-existing business contracts/bulk licence agreements.
It's a bit like Citrix ICA, but it's designed to hook onto a full virtualised desktop on the backend. You don't just get a thin-client desktop to play with, you get an entire hosted virtual PC all to yourself. Obviously the hardware load on your infrastructure + ESX servers is that much more than terminal server/citrix, and it's still a very new product. As you say, the enterprise backend is pretty expensive, while the client can now be stuck in anything and everything, including thin terminals.
VDI (virtual desktop infrastructure) is their old name for this, they've now put it under the Vmware View name.
Oh, I did forget one.
Vmware ESXi - free, cut down version of ESX, very new. bare-metal hypervisor (so you need to dedicate an entire physical server to it), and you manage it much like ESX, though you need to pay to combine multiple ESXi servers together under one management screen. Rather similar in principle to vmware server; depends whether you want the host OS to also do other things, or just give the entire box over to ESXi (which is quicker and more robust)
* VMware Fusion - desktop virtualization on macs, also allows you to run individual windows apps but they appear as a window on your OSX desktop. Not free.
* VMware server - free virtual server hosting setup. Fairly basic, but allows you to run multiple OSes on a single physical server and linux or windows host OS, and have them provide services on the network - or RDP/VNC into them and use them for testing, etc.
* VMware workstation - similar to vmware fusion, but for linux/windows, and without the 'open an app as a native window' feature. Not free. Designed to create and snapshot multiple vms on your own desktop.
* VMware view - virtual desktops. You give your users their own personal desktop image, but it's stored on your ESX servers, not their local hard-drive. A bit like thin clients, but you virtualise the entire pc, not just the desktop. they break it with a virus? Spin them a new one off the spare pool, or bring their old one back from backup snapshot. Or just have a standard pool, and hand them out automatically as needed. Vmware view is the clientside app that lets them connect to their virtual desktop, but since all the virtualisation work is done serverside, the client can be low-power.
* VMware ESX - enterprise grade virtualisation server. Combined with vmware infrastructure, you run a bare minimum hypervisor (no overhead from a standard linux or windows OS host), store your virtual machines on a SAN or NFS, have a pool of physical servers and automatically load-balance your VMs between them or even bring them back up automatically if a physical server goes bang. Nearly completely abstract your servers from the hardware, run 20 servers per actual piece of tin. Very much not free.
* VMware Player - free basic app that lets you run VMs on your desktop, but not create them. Largely superceded by vmware server (now free) except for specific uses.
* VMware ACE - packaged VMs. You create a VM with workstation, send it out, then they run the ACE package on their local PC, with a VM OS + app setup inside it. Allows you to have a standardised VM available on your desktop machines, without all the overhead of ESX, SAN, network etc, but your desktops need to be grunty.
Wheras now, they're just going to log everything, at the ISPs expense, and copy it to a giant government database where it'll be available for fishing expedition by lots of different government bodies; police, security services, revenue and customs, local councils investigating littering...
They should release at maximum, 3 versions. Home, Professional, and Ultimate.
Perhaps they'd be better off calling them
Windows 7 Budget (home) and
Windows 7 I'm Not Cheap (professional)
Windows 7 Ludicrously Overpriced And I Like It Because That Means It Must Be Good (Enterprise)
But it would be just as easy to make the options well, optional at install with the option of adding them in later - aka similar to the choice of simplified installation package collections you get when you install most distros.
Forcing you to choose between media centre (home premium) and remote desktop (business), for example, unless you buy the uber-expensive ultimate option is just designed to extract as much money from the market, via segmentation, as possible; it's a cynical move that harms their customers.
I've put windows 7 public beta on my eee 901. It's a bit of a tight fit on the 4GB SSD, so I had to move the programs folder and user settings across to the 2ndary 8GB SSD and hard-link, but it runs pretty nicely indeed with Aero, on the 945 chipset. A hell of a lot better than vista.
I haven't benched it yet, but subjectively it runs the same or faster as XP in user-responsiveness. I did try ubuntu and easypeasy on it too, but the startup and launch hit from putting /usr on the slower 8GB was too much, so I'll stick to keeping ubuntu on my full-fat desktops for now.
1) Teacher workstation in each room, with projector and an "Elmo."
2) Computer labs, with thin or fat clients, depending on your needs.
3) Laptop carts, so individual classes can use a set of laptops if needed.
This is the setup I would go for. We have a very similar setup in a private school of about 600 pupils. We have 4 large fixed labs (25+) which any department can use for individual lessons, including internet based classes such as ECDL and some learning support based material. Each department also has at least one mini-lab of up to 12 computers used for individual lessons.
The individual teacher workstations plus projector, active whiteboard and dvd/vhs player + audio are probably the most effective IT in the school. We also have them in the lecture halls, for larger presentations.
There is also one laptop cart for roving use, and we're likely to get another soon. Thin clients are fine for light-use areas, and thick clients for areas such as DT, MFL and IT. Don't forget you're going to need a beefy wifi infrastructure to support significant numbers of laptops; something like aruba, rather than a horde of crappy individual waps.
There are two main issues. Training, and support. Without sufficient ongoing IT in education training for the teaching staff, ANY resources you put in will be underused. Equally, you MUST have sufficient IT staff to keep the labs running and the teacher whiteboard machines operational in short order, in addition to your central systems and servers staff. Keep the machines locked down tight, and use central software deployment and a quick imaging system to keep downtime to a minimum, or thin clients for the same reasons.
Individual personal laptops/netbooks for the students will significantly increase your overheads in terms of both infrastructure and support. Most of our students have their own laptops for things like homework, but they're not integrated into lessons, given the likelyhood of them having viruses, dodgy software and the students using them to goof off in lessons. It can work for older students (6th form), but it will be a massive headache in actually trying to teach with non-school controlled laptops in the lower years.
Server wise, I can strongly recommend a virtualised solution (we use vmware esx + SAN, but xen + management tools such as citrix also works). Don't forget to build your switch fabric robust enough for growth, including easy vlan management and layer 3 routing where needed. vlan'ing your teacher pcs away from curriculum pcs, and wireless laptops vlan'd away from everything else is hopefully a no brainer.
All very valid points - but do his self-admitted offences deserve 70 years in jail, or even 'see him fry' in New Jersey? As opposed to the 2-3 years he faces if convicted in a British Court?
The law is about justice, not just punishment. I don't think his offences justify a death sentence, either one threatend by the US government, or from his own hand in fear of what they've threatened him with.
McKinnon is trying to be tried in the UK, where he'd face 2-3 years in prison. He's already admitted he broke into the computers looking for alien evidence.
If he's successfully extradited to the US, he faces 70 years in jail. This case also show the unfairness of the extradition system between the UK and US. The UK changed its system so that people accused of serious offences could be extradited without any need to show the evidence against the accused to a British court, to speed up the process. The US was supposed to change their process similiarly, but have since sat on it, yet another example of Britain doing what the US wants and getting shit in return.
So far, they've used the new process to extradite people such as the natwest 3, who, while since found guilty, are british and committed their crimes in the UK while working for a UK company. And of course, extraditing McKinnon with no need to show probable cause.
Many people here in the UK feel that while he may indeed be due some punishment in the UK for what he's admitted doing, the US government is effectively using him as a scapegoat for their failings; that this is about hugely over-proportionate revenge rather than justice.
According to this analysis, the writers anticipated the daily domain-generation algorithm it uses to check for updates being reverse engineered, and they put in additional protection so that it would only download code from the original authors - presumably using some kind of key signing.
It's cheaper than that; server 2008 licences for education are about £95 a pop, plus CAL's of course. Handy when you're also building a VMware based setup.
We're a school going the other way - we were running a mixture of NT4 and linux servers, glued together with samba and ldap, including redhat directory server, and finally got the money and the time to upgrade.
I have to say, when you're using windows desktop clients (pretty much mandatory because of windows-only educational software), active directory is a hell of a lot easier to manage and support. We actually went with AD on server 2008 because management want Exchange+outlook for the teaching staff (integration into other software, shared calendaring etc), instead of our current dovecot/squirrelmail solution.
Linux will definitely still have a place on the backend, but it makes a lot more sense to have samba tied into AD, rather than the other way around. Sure, it costs more, but the amount of MY time it will save by not being the only guy who can do anything with the servers will be pretty hefty.
Ah, I see you've worked at my office then.
The key thing to remember when working with people like this is that they have a different way of working with their computer. They might use a computer for the entirety of their working day, but they never actually learn how to use it at all.
What they do is memorise tasks that achieve specific goals. To you and me, we learn how to do an abstract process - like how email works - then adapt that process to fit to whatever we're doing at the time. If we want to do something we haven't done before, we use our standard process of looking it up on google or the help files, and follow the instructions. If we want to find and submit an RMA form, we think 'ah, that's a document. I'll edit and print that in word.' You open word, open the document, then print it to your closest printer, having learned the general process for each - or at least how to look it up. Using a different version or a different printer doesn't phase us, because we know what we're looking for, and just browse around till we find what microsoft called the action this time round.
For them though, they never learn, or want to learn the process. As you say, it's a magic black box. They don't know it's word. They barely know it's a document. What they DO know is that, when they were shown how to do it on the PC they inherited from their predecessor, when they want to process an RMA request they go to the 4th icon along, 2 down on the 'screensaver' and double click. They then go here, here and here and write this and that bit of information in. They then go to the bar at the top, click the big round button, and select the 4th option down, and click the 2nd option. And the piece of paper comes out the printer.
Then their computer breaks. They can't click the 4th icon along, 2nd down any more because the screen is all black. They ring tech support to tell them they can't process RMA forms right now, and they need to do one really urgently, and get a load of gibberish questions about what version of office they're using, and is it in their documents thingie, and can they open it on their neighbours PC or whatever, and what they WANT is someone to come out and fix it, right now, so they can send off this RMA form like usual that the manager told them to send off urgently. What they get is a new computer, and now NOTHING is where it should be. How can I work like this? where's my H: drive button gone? How can I possibly do RMA forms when it's not ANYWHERE on my screensaver?
My solution? Wait for them all to die and be replaced by their children.
mp3 players might have been drab before the iPod, but they were certainly far from useless. I had two different sd-card based mp3 players years before the iPod launched, and they both worked perfectly well for playing mp3s I ripped from my CD collection.
I think penny-arcade said it best when the iPod first launched.
as for the iPhone... has it got cut and paste yet? Can I use it with a carrier of my choice without having to break the DRM, or avoid pay through the nose for the data plan? Can I download and install my own apps? Or is it just a pretty, expensive, show-off chunk of easily scratched plastic?
There were plenty of great phones out before the iPhone, and there'll be plenty after it - just look at the stuff you can get outside the US.
You think that's bad. In the UK, they take your prints and DNA when you're arrested, and then store them permanently, regardless of conviction or even if it goes to trial. They keep the DNA of people who volunteered it in community testing to eliminate themselves from enquiry, having been promised it would be destroyed. It wasn't. The police even have the DNA of hundreds of young children, via various means.
The government recently lost a case in the European Courts over keeping DNA records of innocent people indefinitely, but they show no signs of changing the practice.
It's worse than that. You don't even have to have been convicted of a crime, merely arrested to be excluded from the visa waiver program - which means applying via an expensive process with a 6 week or longer wait to get it, with no guarantee it'll be granted.
Simply for being *arrested for questioning* at any point in your life.