We use CentOS AND RHEL. On a few mission critical servers running non-FOSS apps certified to run on RHEL, we use RHEL. We want to know that in event of a major problem (especially if I was gone for some reason) we can call the app vendor or RH and be reasonably confident the problem will get fixed. We've never needed to do that, but over the past decade it has remained far cheaper to pay RH than run the same app on Windows servers.
We aren't talking about talking about tens of thousands of dollars to be able to run RH and get updates. If you want the ability to call Red Hat for support on a case-by-case bases, you can get an annual RHEL license for as low as $349 (academic pricing is more like $60/yr!). $799/year gets a 1-hour response for critical issues. But it is up to your boss to decide what level of support, if any, he wants to go with.
For many of our other servers we use CentOS. Some can be down with little affect on the organization. Others are just running basic LAMP and FOSS apps where certification isn't an option or isn't required for support. Frankly there is no benefit to us to use RHEL on these servers as we are able to fully support the OS and recover from even severe problems.
If you don't have any need for Red Hat's services, software/hardware certifications, or anything else that adds value to RHEL, then by all means stick to CentOS. If you are worried RHEL (and therefore CentOS) will go away if you don't support RHEL, insist that your boss buy a contract (and don't complain when you are looking for your new job.)
It is all insurance. As others have said, the real question is how much will downtime cost you? Will RHEL reduce the chance of downtime? Will it shorten the amount of time until recovery? Will it show enough "due diligence" to your boss's bosses to keep both of you employed after a disaster? If you are really worried, fire off a memo to your boss with your concerns and then accept whatever he decides. (But keep a copy as CYA for yourself in case you turn out to be correct.)
A vote yes is a vote to ratify a non-functional standard.
How is that beneficial?
Easy answer: MONEY. I mean how many times have you seen one of these guys push a solution that was so completely wrong for the customer that it was painful to watch? But push it they did because it was an MS product and fit in with the "MS ecosystem" that they sell and support.
Standards only matter if you want to interoperate with others. OR if you want to SELL to people who care about standards and think it means a level playing field, more competition and compatibility with others. No reason to think that MS partners care if the standard is broken or care if anyone but MS can use it. As long as it works with MS products they'll get their sales and customer lock-in.
I did my homework when I moved 15 miles out of the city. I called Verizon and they assured me that YES, DSL service is available at the address where I was considering buying. I called back later and ordered it to be installed in the day I would close on the sale and was again told that yes, everything looked fine.
A couple weeks after I moved and still didn't have DSL I called I was told that sorry, the line conditions to my home prevent it. I later learned this was BS. As I was driving past the switching station I saw a Verizon tech coming out of the building so I stopped and asked what the problem was with the lines. He said that the problem with the line was that Verizon doesn't even have DSL equipment at this town's switch. (Verizon has fiber run within 100 yards of the switching station, btw.)
I started looking into wireless (latency with satellite made it a non-option for my needs.) The community was interested in offering wireless broadband service but laws passed in my state forbid it. (Laws lobbied for by the telco industry btw.)
Charter offered cable TV already but seems to have no interest in offering Internet as long as Verizon wasn't doing it either.
A local business was willing to split T1 costs (best price I could find was $550/mo) but I'd have to get service back to my home and there is a large hill between them and me. So I checked on leasing dark copper and using a Pairgain unit to send the data over it. Verizon wanted about $65/mo for the 3 miles of copper. (Over double the cost of using the same copper wire AND phone service for telephone... plus NO service level gaurantees.)
I left fliers with 200 homes in the community and 30 people took the time to call/email and say that they would love to get broadband at any reasonable price. (If you do any work with advertising, you'll now that 15% call back is awesome and likely means that as much as 40-50% of people in town would pay for broadband. Which makes sense since many people in town work in the "city" 15-20 miles away.)
I would have started a wireless Internet business (WISP) but if Verizon or Charter decided that they wanted to offer broadband in town after all within the first couple of years I would have lost my shirt on the equipment costs needed to start up from scratch.
Eventually I shared my "market research" with an existing WISP 25 miles away and they extended their network into town. I finally have broadband (512kb/512kb - which I can live with) at a price I can live with. If I had it to do all over again I would probably go ahead and start up that WISP business. Very high speed links are available wirelessly sometimes as much as 100 miles or more. Once the initial equipment is paid for it becomes a steady income without a ton of work (which I'm sure is why Verizon, etc. love being ISPs.)
I thought twice about putting last bit about teenagers in. There have always been people who avoid responsibility at all levels. Teens, as a group, just tend to fit that category more often.
The fact is that it's becoming epidemic these days. 35 year old man - "I blew off my hand with a homemade bomb. It's the fault of the people who sold me fertilizer, fuel oil and plumbing supplies." (No, dumbass... it's your fault for building a bomb.)
Of course these days he'd also be put in jail as a terrorist for wanting to blow up a stump.
Or a major case of CYA. Instead of saying, "We screwed up," the decision makers are defending their original mistake. Why? Fear of losing a job? Fear of "admitting" to something that may get them sued?
Who knows. But this whole inability to take responsibility for your actions (individual or group) isn't limited to teens anymore.
get a clue and stop trying to CONTROL CHILDREN by using CENSORSHIP
I know it's in vogue to claim that schools just want to control kids and stick them in little boxes. I'll admit that sometimes colossally bad decisions are made at a school or some seemingly arbitrary new school rule is added. But the truth is that there may be more behind what is done than you realize. Still, it's a fact that school and district admins are just people and sometimes people make mistakes even with the best intentions.
To be perfectly honest I would love to do away with filtering. I have things to deal with besides whether Johnny has the ability to see a nipple on images.google.com or if Cindy is sending emails to her new Lesbian girlfriend she met online who lives in another state. There are four things that stop me from yanking the filters and giving everyone unrestricted access:
http://goat.cx/ - No six year old should stumble upon the nastier version of that site. Heck I'm not a prude but I wish I'd never stumbled upon it. Think a 3rd grader doing a report on beavers (the kind that make dams) won't accidentally see something they are too young to understand?
Parents - After some kid spends four hours trying to bypass filters and manages to see a breast then they (or the kid sitting next to them) quickly goes home to tell mom and dad how they saw someone having sex on the school computers. Some parents are shocked that their "innocent" child was exposed to something like that and will call all of their neighbors to warn them. At least we can tell the angry mob that shows up that we are making an honest effort to block access to that stuff. Then usually they put down the pitchforks.
Federal/State laws - While we can't be hauled in to jail for not filtering we can have money withheld. If you think your school is doing a poor job then how good do you think it would be if they had 1/2 of the budget to pay for things like teachers, books or electricity?
PC Access - We had MUCH looser filters a few years ago. Then the lab assistants called to let us know that regularly every computer in the lab was in use by someone using chat or web-based email often for the entire hour.
Since I've been asked this offline I'll assume someone is going to ask here... "What's wrong with #4? Their parent's taxes pay for the computers, Internet access and even your salary!"
True, but so do the parents of all of the kids who can't get time on a computer to work on actual homework. I bet the parents of the kid chatting away every one of his study periods expects that their tax money is going to educate their children... not to let them search for Britney Spears look-alikes naked.
Censorship is never an appropriate solution to anything,
Nobody is shutting down web sites. Nobody is telling you that you can't watch videos of some chick getting it on with a horse. Nobody is censoring anything. You are free to view/read what you want online in your own home with your own computer using Internet access that you or your parents pay for. We're just saying, "No, not here, not with things funded by the public for the purpose of education." Schools aren't (and shouldn't be) your private ISP.
children should be guided and educated rather than controlled or restricted.
A great altruistic ideal and goal. But the truth is that a fair amount of time is spent educating students in our district about not only what they should and shouldn't do online but why. Things are taught like how it might affect their future career if they view porn at work, etc.. I believe that with a large percentage of students that is enough and they won't intentionally go to sites they shouldn't.
But if you take 1200 kids in one school and just say "shame on you. It's naughty for you to do that and here is why..." then there will still be enough wasting computer time to keep those who want to learn and do their homework off of the PCs.
What's the difference between a 3 month suspension and an expulsion? Three months is 13-14 weeks. How many kids are going to pass an 18 week semester after missing 13-14 weeks of it while getting automatic 0s on every assignment?
Sure expulsion means they can't come back but they are pretty FSCKED either way.
I have to agree with you. As a district admin, I have something to say to those who feel that because a proxy was available it's the school's fault students used it.
Bull! Before someone claims that schools should block 100% of the "bad sites" out there and that not doing so gives students the right to use them, try this:
Go get set up a SquiGuard filtering server or buy an expensive commercial filter or find one you can get a "demo" for 30 days.
Set up some PCs behind the filter.
Block MySpace.com
Spend some time finding all of the proxy servers you can and add them to the block list.
Now find 6 teens who are comfortable using Google and computers in general (so basically any 6 teens.)
*important* - Provide free Pizza it's a good motivator
Have three just browse the Internet for stuff they are interested in.
Challenge the other three to get around the filters and get to MySpace.com
Tell the kids to switch PCs every 5-10 minutes.
Go to another room so you can't see who is at which PC
Using only the logs and reports from your filter software, figure out when someone accesses MySpace.com through a proxy.
Confirm that the site really is a proxy site and not just a single page on a big hosting server.
Add the new site/page to the block list
Repeat 11-14 until you are pretty certain you have every proxy blocked.
Check with the teens and find out you are wrong. Go back to 11.
Now ask yourself... how much time did you just spend doing nothing but blocking proxy sites? Do you think it would be easier/harder if you had 1200 kids who might or might not be trying to find proxy sites instead of 6? Would you be willing to spend that much time every day? (New proxies appear constantly you know.)
And in the end is it which important? That you stop every kid who wants to break the rules and an agreement *that they signed*? Or that your firewall is set up right, the servers work, all 600-1000 PCs are up and running, Windows is patched, networking is Ok, Internet access is working, the servers hard drives aren't filling up, etc.?
I could probably do a fair job of blocking almost every proxy out there if only I spent 1/2 of my day every day working at it. But why? When did "You didn't stop me" become the same as "I'm allowed to"?
What if life was like that? Someone stole your bike? Sorry, we can't punish them. You may have had a lock and chain on it, but the chain wasn't resistant to acetylene torches. You didn't take full precautions.
Someone broke into your house and stole your computer? Yeah, we caught them but had to let them go. Why? They said that your doors and windows were locked but that they smashed your bedroom window with a rock. A rock they found in your yard. You should have either used break-proof glass or removed every rock from the yard. Your security was too flawed so we had to let them go and keep the PC too.
Unfortunately there is no shortage of people who will do dumb things which are not in their best interest.
It's a numbers game. If you are getting millions of spams into inboxes worldwide daily you don't need that many people to buy your product/service to make significant profits. 1% of 1 million is still 10,000. (And in the US, 1.5% if us have an IQ BELOW 60.)
The typical excuse for allowing unfettered wiretapping, monitoring (video, electronic and otherwise), spying on your Internet traffic, etc. etc. etc. is "If you aren't doing anything wrong then you have nothing to worry about."
I call "bullshit." I am a boring person. I don't do anything illegal. I don't even speed (55 means 55) unless not speeding means creating a hazardous situation on the road. I don't do drugs. I don't drink much and if I do I don't drive. I have paid for every single piece of music I have with not a single song downloaded illegally.
Yet I am vehemently against unfettered government monitoring and control of every aspect of my life and computer use.
But if I don't break the law then why care? Because "the law" is not static. What happens when some really stupid law (or yet another really stupid law) hits the books? How about prohibition of alcohol in the 1920s and early '30s? Imagine if every time someone brewed beer, made wine or ran a still they were caught?
The point is that something you feel is completely and morally acceptable can be banned and with enough spying you could be jailed. And "the government" is just people. People who may or may not have your best interest in mind. Do you really want eyes peering into every aspect of your life?
I guess you only have to worry about it if you are a troublemaker or rule breaker. After all certainly you wouldn't do anything illegal like watch a DVD on Linux. Right?
FoxPro IS fast or at least was when I used it last. BUT only if you are retrieving limited datasets that are indexed correctly. If your query can use indexed columns to limit the number of records returned you are ok.
I did the programming on a system which resided on a Netware v4.11 server back around 1993 and it had one table with somewhere around 3 million records. Queries were lightning fast if you didn't match too many rows and the query was optimized to work with your indexes. Queries which couldn't utilize indexes, however, were painfully slow.
Having said all that, however, I can't think of any legitimate reason to use DBASE style databases these days. With free DB servers like MySQL and PostgreSQL why bother?
I just can't imagine the typical workflow steps are going to work with a linux box right now.
How hard could it be to put an image on a bootable Linux system recovery CD? That seems to be the recommended fix 90% of the time anyhow. An intelligent system recovery that let you choose to leave config directories and/or home directories alone would not be that hard either. And unlike a Windows recovery CD the CD image could be downloadable. Heck, a one-click install CD for just about any distro with Dell enhancements would be totally legal.
Fine then let Google make their TOS state something to the effect of:
"Continued indexing of your website is dependant on permitting Google to link, cache, etc. etc. any public areas of the site. We encourage you to use appropriate technologies such as robots.txt or page META tags to indicate you do not want some content indexed, cached, etc. etc. If you do not want to use these technologies your sole recourse is to request that the entire site be removed from our servers and not indexed, cached, etc., etc."
They are providing a service and they are getting paid to do so by ad revenue. It's a lot like a restaurant suing a fine foods magazine because they published a favorable article and included photos of the building and the foods and sold ads on the same pages. You want to be reviewed in the magazine for free? Then stop bitching about ad sales.
Rating of "Funny" isn't appropriate here. City of Kenosha, WI already does this as do several other cities accross the U.S. All tend to report 1/2 to 1/3 total IT costs compared to similar sized cities in their areas.
Yes! No more taxies! The road is a public asset, afterall.
Unlike the PC he used, however, the general public has access to roads. The general public does not have access to his PC. In theory giving him an unfair economic advantage at taxpayer expense.
He didn't write it from scratch. He took code given to WI from IA and modified it. Trying to sell it as his own would make him guilty of copyright violation.
If he doesn't acknowledge any kind of license then he has NO rights to use someone else's source code in "his" software.
There IS a license for the code he based his work on... the one from IA saying it couldn't be sold commercially. Either he accepts that or he has no right to make a derivative work out of it. Regardless, the license wasn't with him it was with the state.
It is not legal (in WI anyhow) to profit or operate a business using public assets (the PC he was given to use.) If he wanted to start his own software business he should have bought his own PC.... and written the code all from scratch.
And as others have mentioned, he was given time (and paid) to work on the software. If he needed more time he should have told someone. This code is "work for hire" programming and decidedly not his.
He MAY be able to recover pay (even overtime) if he can show his superiors knew or should have known about the time he spent on it. I can't see him getting anything else. He's never going to be making millions off that software.
He could always destroy the source code instead of giving it to the state... and risk being sent to jail for a computer crime.
In a prior job I was asked (in front of everyone in the boardroom) to estimate how long it would take to do a project which had just come up and only been discussed for 15 minutes or so. When I said that I would need some time to spec it out I was told that would not be possible.
After thinking about it for a minute or two I decided that 90 days would be reasonable based on what I knew of the specs at the time and my current work load but that I could manage 60 if I could put this one first on the list of priorities.
I was then told that 60 was too long, how about two weeks? I finally compromised at 30 days with overtime and absolutely no other work on anything else in the company.
I finished the programming on the evening of the 30th day, went home and wrote up some instructions I could use for training the people who needed to use it. First thing the next morning I was taken to a conference room by my boss and literally *yelled* at because nobody was using the program yet. (Thisw as the 31st day.)
I explained that the program was done but I had to train the users that morning so they could be operational in the afternoon. (Only about 10 people needed to use it right away.) This was dismissed with a *shout* of "Nobody is using it, therefore it is not finished!" He considered the program a failure.
Do you see anywhere that management could have been at fault for the project "failing" here? It's all too common to have management fall into the Capt. Kirk role. (Scotty: "I have the engines at 100%", Kirk: "Damnit Scotty, I need more power!") Maybe it's the techies who do screw around that make them think the rest of us just need to be pushed harder to get better performance out of us. I don't know but I've seen it more than you might think.
BTW, when I say "yelling" I mean it. Face red, blood pressure skyrocketing, the works. BTW #2, the program worked just fine starting late that afternoon after staff were shown where it was and how to use it. BTW #3, that was the day I decided to find a new job and stop blowing off offers from headhunters. (I was somewhere else with a 40% pay raise three months later.)
PHB readers habitually skip over all the "techie details" anyway, so they probably come away with the desired message: "We need Foowhatzit Humdingers, and we need 'em now!"
Even simpler... PHB: "This is almost 2x faster for under 1/2 the price? Buy it!" It happens more in IT I think because, face it, when is the last time a non-tech item doubled it's performance for half price in only a few years? You can bet the robotic welding arm the PHB bought recently doesn't have a 70% performance gain at 65% cost vs the one from 2001.
15 years ago (wow I feel old now) a sprinkler main burst where I worked. It was on the 2nd floor of the offices and it dumped 20,000 gallons. The stairway was a cool waterfall, 3-5 inches of water were standing on the 1st floor and it was raining throughout the entire 1st floor as water soaked through the ceiling tiles.
This was in February and the temperature outside was around -10 F (-23 C) so opening the outer doors to let the water out also let freezing air in which instantly formed a fog you could barely see five feet in.
Luckily the downpour in the server room fell about 1 inch away from all of the equipment. All of the PCs on the 1st floor weren't so lucky. With the help of bunch of towels, rubbing alcohol, canned air and hair dryers we managed to save everything but 1 keyboard, one UPS and two CRTs.
I still find it interesting that at 18 you're allowed join the military and die but you're not allowed to drink alcohol.
Which probably means you are under the drinking age in your state. Most people who are old enough to drink (legally) don't really care that you can't drink. In fact quite a few remember all the stupid things they did while drunk at your age and all the close calls they had.
And that is why it's so hard to get the drinking age changed for those under 21. The majority of the public can only be affected negatively.
To be honest though, another poster that claimed an 18/21 year old drinking age adds to the allure and mystique of drinking is probably right.
Awesome! So the BBC gets you to do some of the work of distributing their content... and you get to pay them for the right?
If companies want to use P2P to distribute restricted content I can only think of one way it would be really accepted. Charge the customer a nominal fee for the content but don't bill it for x days... during that time credit some $ back to the customer based on the # of MB re-distributed from their PC to other paying customers. Someone with a nice fast upstream connection who is willing to leave their PC running P2P sharing files for a couple of weeks might get a final bill of a few cents or even $0. Heck maybe even better would be just to give the user a cut of each purchase based on how much of that purchase was downloaded from them. (Help pay for that 36Mb upstream FiOS connection.)
Then again I guess they can always count on users being completely ignorant of the fact that it's *their own* bandwidth being used to distribute something the BBC is getting paid for.
My PC with a 400W power supply sucks about 85 watts sitting mostly idle when I put a power meter on it. Confirming parent's post.
Re:Standard geek viewpoint == standard geek proble
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Why Vista Took So Long
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· Score: 1
And you'd have to read the GGP, GP and parent post to realize this part of the discussion was specifically about the "geek" mindset and not Joe Sixpack running Windows on his laptop.
From GGP post:
A true geek would want to be questioned for each process...
Slashdot Mirror
We use CentOS AND RHEL. On a few mission critical servers running non-FOSS apps certified to run on RHEL, we use RHEL. We want to know that in event of a major problem (especially if I was gone for some reason) we can call the app vendor or RH and be reasonably confident the problem will get fixed. We've never needed to do that, but over the past decade it has remained far cheaper to pay RH than run the same app on Windows servers. We aren't talking about talking about tens of thousands of dollars to be able to run RH and get updates. If you want the ability to call Red Hat for support on a case-by-case bases, you can get an annual RHEL license for as low as $349 (academic pricing is more like $60/yr!). $799/year gets a 1-hour response for critical issues. But it is up to your boss to decide what level of support, if any, he wants to go with. For many of our other servers we use CentOS. Some can be down with little affect on the organization. Others are just running basic LAMP and FOSS apps where certification isn't an option or isn't required for support. Frankly there is no benefit to us to use RHEL on these servers as we are able to fully support the OS and recover from even severe problems. If you don't have any need for Red Hat's services, software/hardware certifications, or anything else that adds value to RHEL, then by all means stick to CentOS. If you are worried RHEL (and therefore CentOS) will go away if you don't support RHEL, insist that your boss buy a contract (and don't complain when you are looking for your new job.) It is all insurance. As others have said, the real question is how much will downtime cost you? Will RHEL reduce the chance of downtime? Will it shorten the amount of time until recovery? Will it show enough "due diligence" to your boss's bosses to keep both of you employed after a disaster? If you are really worried, fire off a memo to your boss with your concerns and then accept whatever he decides. (But keep a copy as CYA for yourself in case you turn out to be correct.)
Easy answer: MONEY. I mean how many times have you seen one of these guys push a solution that was so completely wrong for the customer that it was painful to watch? But push it they did because it was an MS product and fit in with the "MS ecosystem" that they sell and support.
Standards only matter if you want to interoperate with others. OR if you want to SELL to people who care about standards and think it means a level playing field, more competition and compatibility with others. No reason to think that MS partners care if the standard is broken or care if anyone but MS can use it. As long as it works with MS products they'll get their sales and customer lock-in.
I did my homework when I moved 15 miles out of the city. I called Verizon and they assured me that YES, DSL service is available at the address where I was considering buying. I called back later and ordered it to be installed in the day I would close on the sale and was again told that yes, everything looked fine.
A couple weeks after I moved and still didn't have DSL I called I was told that sorry, the line conditions to my home prevent it. I later learned this was BS. As I was driving past the switching station I saw a Verizon tech coming out of the building so I stopped and asked what the problem was with the lines. He said that the problem with the line was that Verizon doesn't even have DSL equipment at this town's switch. (Verizon has fiber run within 100 yards of the switching station, btw.)
I started looking into wireless (latency with satellite made it a non-option for my needs.) The community was interested in offering wireless broadband service but laws passed in my state forbid it. (Laws lobbied for by the telco industry btw.)
Charter offered cable TV already but seems to have no interest in offering Internet as long as Verizon wasn't doing it either.
A local business was willing to split T1 costs (best price I could find was $550/mo) but I'd have to get service back to my home and there is a large hill between them and me. So I checked on leasing dark copper and using a Pairgain unit to send the data over it. Verizon wanted about $65/mo for the 3 miles of copper. (Over double the cost of using the same copper wire AND phone service for telephone... plus NO service level gaurantees.)
I left fliers with 200 homes in the community and 30 people took the time to call/email and say that they would love to get broadband at any reasonable price. (If you do any work with advertising, you'll now that 15% call back is awesome and likely means that as much as 40-50% of people in town would pay for broadband. Which makes sense since many people in town work in the "city" 15-20 miles away.)
I would have started a wireless Internet business (WISP) but if Verizon or Charter decided that they wanted to offer broadband in town after all within the first couple of years I would have lost my shirt on the equipment costs needed to start up from scratch.
Eventually I shared my "market research" with an existing WISP 25 miles away and they extended their network into town. I finally have broadband (512kb/512kb - which I can live with) at a price I can live with. If I had it to do all over again I would probably go ahead and start up that WISP business. Very high speed links are available wirelessly sometimes as much as 100 miles or more. Once the initial equipment is paid for it becomes a steady income without a ton of work (which I'm sure is why Verizon, etc. love being ISPs.)
The fact is that it's becoming epidemic these days. 35 year old man - "I blew off my hand with a homemade bomb. It's the fault of the people who sold me fertilizer, fuel oil and plumbing supplies." (No, dumbass... it's your fault for building a bomb.)
Of course these days he'd also be put in jail as a terrorist for wanting to blow up a stump.
Or a major case of CYA. Instead of saying, "We screwed up," the decision makers are defending their original mistake. Why? Fear of losing a job? Fear of "admitting" to something that may get them sued?
Who knows. But this whole inability to take responsibility for your actions (individual or group) isn't limited to teens anymore.
I know it's in vogue to claim that schools just want to control kids and stick them in little boxes. I'll admit that sometimes colossally bad decisions are made at a school or some seemingly arbitrary new school rule is added. But the truth is that there may be more behind what is done than you realize. Still, it's a fact that school and district admins are just people and sometimes people make mistakes even with the best intentions.
To be perfectly honest I would love to do away with filtering. I have things to deal with besides whether Johnny has the ability to see a nipple on images.google.com or if Cindy is sending emails to her new Lesbian girlfriend she met online who lives in another state. There are four things that stop me from yanking the filters and giving everyone unrestricted access:
Since I've been asked this offline I'll assume someone is going to ask here... "What's wrong with #4? Their parent's taxes pay for the computers, Internet access and even your salary!"
True, but so do the parents of all of the kids who can't get time on a computer to work on actual homework. I bet the parents of the kid chatting away every one of his study periods expects that their tax money is going to educate their children... not to let them search for Britney Spears look-alikes naked.
Nobody is shutting down web sites. Nobody is telling you that you can't watch videos of some chick getting it on with a horse. Nobody is censoring anything. You are free to view/read what you want online in your own home with your own computer using Internet access that you or your parents pay for. We're just saying, "No, not here, not with things funded by the public for the purpose of education." Schools aren't (and shouldn't be) your private ISP.
A great altruistic ideal and goal. But the truth is that a fair amount of time is spent educating students in our district about not only what they should and shouldn't do online but why. Things are taught like how it might affect their future career if they view porn at work, etc.. I believe that with a large percentage of students that is enough and they won't intentionally go to sites they shouldn't.
But if you take 1200 kids in one school and just say "shame on you. It's naughty for you to do that and here is why..." then there will still be enough wasting computer time to keep those who want to learn and do their homework off of the PCs.
What's the difference between a 3 month suspension and an expulsion? Three months is 13-14 weeks. How many kids are going to pass an 18 week semester after missing 13-14 weeks of it while getting automatic 0s on every assignment?
Sure expulsion means they can't come back but they are pretty FSCKED either way.
Bull! Before someone claims that schools should block 100% of the "bad sites" out there and that not doing so gives students the right to use them, try this:
Now ask yourself... how much time did you just spend doing nothing but blocking proxy sites? Do you think it would be easier/harder if you had 1200 kids who might or might not be trying to find proxy sites instead of 6? Would you be willing to spend that much time every day? (New proxies appear constantly you know.)
And in the end is it which important? That you stop every kid who wants to break the rules and an agreement *that they signed*? Or that your firewall is set up right, the servers work, all 600-1000 PCs are up and running, Windows is patched, networking is Ok, Internet access is working, the servers hard drives aren't filling up, etc.?
I could probably do a fair job of blocking almost every proxy out there if only I spent 1/2 of my day every day working at it. But why? When did "You didn't stop me" become the same as "I'm allowed to"?
What if life was like that? Someone stole your bike? Sorry, we can't punish them. You may have had a lock and chain on it, but the chain wasn't resistant to acetylene torches. You didn't take full precautions.
Someone broke into your house and stole your computer? Yeah, we caught them but had to let them go. Why? They said that your doors and windows were locked but that they smashed your bedroom window with a rock. A rock they found in your yard. You should have either used break-proof glass or removed every rock from the yard. Your security was too flawed so we had to let them go and keep the PC too.
It's a numbers game. If you are getting millions of spams into inboxes worldwide daily you don't need that many people to buy your product/service to make significant profits. 1% of 1 million is still 10,000. (And in the US, 1.5% if us have an IQ BELOW 60.)
I call "bullshit." I am a boring person. I don't do anything illegal. I don't even speed (55 means 55) unless not speeding means creating a hazardous situation on the road. I don't do drugs. I don't drink much and if I do I don't drive. I have paid for every single piece of music I have with not a single song downloaded illegally.
Yet I am vehemently against unfettered government monitoring and control of every aspect of my life and computer use.
But if I don't break the law then why care? Because "the law" is not static. What happens when some really stupid law (or yet another really stupid law) hits the books? How about prohibition of alcohol in the 1920s and early '30s? Imagine if every time someone brewed beer, made wine or ran a still they were caught?
The point is that something you feel is completely and morally acceptable can be banned and with enough spying you could be jailed. And "the government" is just people. People who may or may not have your best interest in mind. Do you really want eyes peering into every aspect of your life?
I guess you only have to worry about it if you are a troublemaker or rule breaker. After all certainly you wouldn't do anything illegal like watch a DVD on Linux. Right?
FoxPro IS fast or at least was when I used it last. BUT only if you are retrieving limited datasets that are indexed correctly. If your query can use indexed columns to limit the number of records returned you are ok.
I did the programming on a system which resided on a Netware v4.11 server back around 1993 and it had one table with somewhere around 3 million records. Queries were lightning fast if you didn't match too many rows and the query was optimized to work with your indexes. Queries which couldn't utilize indexes, however, were painfully slow.
Having said all that, however, I can't think of any legitimate reason to use DBASE style databases these days. With free DB servers like MySQL and PostgreSQL why bother?
How hard could it be to put an image on a bootable Linux system recovery CD? That seems to be the recommended fix 90% of the time anyhow. An intelligent system recovery that let you choose to leave config directories and/or home directories alone would not be that hard either. And unlike a Windows recovery CD the CD image could be downloadable. Heck, a one-click install CD for just about any distro with Dell enhancements would be totally legal.
"Continued indexing of your website is dependant on permitting Google to link, cache, etc. etc. any public areas of the site. We encourage you to use appropriate technologies such as robots.txt or page META tags to indicate you do not want some content indexed, cached, etc. etc. If you do not want to use these technologies your sole recourse is to request that the entire site be removed from our servers and not indexed, cached, etc., etc."
They are providing a service and they are getting paid to do so by ad revenue. It's a lot like a restaurant suing a fine foods magazine because they published a favorable article and included photos of the building and the foods and sold ads on the same pages. You want to be reviewed in the magazine for free? Then stop bitching about ad sales.
Rating of "Funny" isn't appropriate here. City of Kenosha, WI already does this as do several other cities accross the U.S. All tend to report 1/2 to 1/3 total IT costs compared to similar sized cities in their areas.
I know you are trying to make a point but that % of all people alive on earth today is about 1/15,000th of a person.
Unlike the PC he used, however, the general public has access to roads. The general public does not have access to his PC. In theory giving him an unfair economic advantage at taxpayer expense.
He MAY be able to recover pay (even overtime) if he can show his superiors knew or should have known about the time he spent on it. I can't see him getting anything else. He's never going to be making millions off that software.
He could always destroy the source code instead of giving it to the state... and risk being sent to jail for a computer crime.
In a prior job I was asked (in front of everyone in the boardroom) to estimate how long it would take to do a project which had just come up and only been discussed for 15 minutes or so. When I said that I would need some time to spec it out I was told that would not be possible.
After thinking about it for a minute or two I decided that 90 days would be reasonable based on what I knew of the specs at the time and my current work load but that I could manage 60 if I could put this one first on the list of priorities.
I was then told that 60 was too long, how about two weeks? I finally compromised at 30 days with overtime and absolutely no other work on anything else in the company.
I finished the programming on the evening of the 30th day, went home and wrote up some instructions I could use for training the people who needed to use it. First thing the next morning I was taken to a conference room by my boss and literally *yelled* at because nobody was using the program yet. (Thisw as the 31st day.)
I explained that the program was done but I had to train the users that morning so they could be operational in the afternoon. (Only about 10 people needed to use it right away.) This was dismissed with a *shout* of "Nobody is using it, therefore it is not finished!" He considered the program a failure.
Do you see anywhere that management could have been at fault for the project "failing" here? It's all too common to have management fall into the Capt. Kirk role. (Scotty: "I have the engines at 100%", Kirk: "Damnit Scotty, I need more power!") Maybe it's the techies who do screw around that make them think the rest of us just need to be pushed harder to get better performance out of us. I don't know but I've seen it more than you might think.
BTW, when I say "yelling" I mean it. Face red, blood pressure skyrocketing, the works. BTW #2, the program worked just fine starting late that afternoon after staff were shown where it was and how to use it. BTW #3, that was the day I decided to find a new job and stop blowing off offers from headhunters. (I was somewhere else with a 40% pay raise three months later.)
Even simpler... PHB: "This is almost 2x faster for under 1/2 the price? Buy it!" It happens more in IT I think because, face it, when is the last time a non-tech item doubled it's performance for half price in only a few years? You can bet the robotic welding arm the PHB bought recently doesn't have a 70% performance gain at 65% cost vs the one from 2001.
That reminds me...
15 years ago (wow I feel old now) a sprinkler main burst where I worked. It was on the 2nd floor of the offices and it dumped 20,000 gallons. The stairway was a cool waterfall, 3-5 inches of water were standing on the 1st floor and it was raining throughout the entire 1st floor as water soaked through the ceiling tiles.
This was in February and the temperature outside was around -10 F (-23 C) so opening the outer doors to let the water out also let freezing air in which instantly formed a fog you could barely see five feet in.
Luckily the downpour in the server room fell about 1 inch away from all of the equipment. All of the PCs on the 1st floor weren't so lucky. With the help of bunch of towels, rubbing alcohol, canned air and hair dryers we managed to save everything but 1 keyboard, one UPS and two CRTs.
A bit of cooking oil poured into the trap will close it and not have evaporation problems.
Which probably means you are under the drinking age in your state. Most people who are old enough to drink (legally) don't really care that you can't drink. In fact quite a few remember all the stupid things they did while drunk at your age and all the close calls they had.
And that is why it's so hard to get the drinking age changed for those under 21. The majority of the public can only be affected negatively.
To be honest though, another poster that claimed an 18/21 year old drinking age adds to the allure and mystique of drinking is probably right.
Awesome! So the BBC gets you to do some of the work of distributing their content... and you get to pay them for the right?
If companies want to use P2P to distribute restricted content I can only think of one way it would be really accepted. Charge the customer a nominal fee for the content but don't bill it for x days... during that time credit some $ back to the customer based on the # of MB re-distributed from their PC to other paying customers. Someone with a nice fast upstream connection who is willing to leave their PC running P2P sharing files for a couple of weeks might get a final bill of a few cents or even $0. Heck maybe even better would be just to give the user a cut of each purchase based on how much of that purchase was downloaded from them. (Help pay for that 36Mb upstream FiOS connection.)
Then again I guess they can always count on users being completely ignorant of the fact that it's *their own* bandwidth being used to distribute something the BBC is getting paid for.
My PC with a 400W power supply sucks about 85 watts sitting mostly idle when I put a power meter on it. Confirming parent's post.
From GGP post: