We have a replacement, it's called TESS
https://tess.mit.edu/
It's not quite the same as Kepler, but has a similar mission.
Good news is TESS's imaging sensors cover a LOT more area than Kepler.
I was just talking about this the other day with some co-workers. It used to be that you could manage your work network, even a decently large network, and know everything about it in your head. Reading a manual and being a smart guy (or gal) was enough to have a working environment.
No more. People expect remote access and that everything should be working 24x7, the added complexity of building out those environments, and the merging of multiple technologies means that every change becomes a much more complex endeavor. Encryption requirements makes everything more difficult to implement and troubleshoot. There are caveats with virtually everything, and I just don't have the time to be an expert on everything around me.
Example from this year - my IP phone system, which integrates with Exchange using custom nonesense for playback in outlook, using the LLDP enabled voice VLAN on my switches, with servers running on my vmware hosts, each of which have multiple redundant connections, with handsets connected to a switch using 802.1x authentication, that's complex enough as it is, but then buried deep in the release notes was a bullet point that exchange 2013 wasn't supported, 18 months after exchange 2013 was released. That's a lot of stuff to be an expert in; a far cry from 10/100 hubs with a single management IP address and a stand alone server that send voicemail over encrypted SMTP.
Not just AD, but group policy, which is a decent GUI that lets you install software and push settings down to computers, users and groups. When you need to modify security settings on 5000 PCs it's pretty painless to do so. Er, most of the time
I get maybe 3 calls a week, used to be a lot more. It's either credit card scams or offering drugs to senior citizens.
I put them on speaker phone, and continue with whatever I'm doing and just babble nonesense at the people on the phone. I figure my cell phone minutes are free, so I can save someone else who might fall for the scam.
Their compression setup makes absolutely no sense to me. The wikipedia article is either wrong, or someone doesn't know what they're doing. When you dive, your body absorbs gasses into your bloodstream. You have to ascend slowly to let the gasses out. Ascend too quickly, and it's like opening a soda bottle in your blood. With a deep dive (say 300 feet), that could take hours. The longer/the deeper you go, the more gasses you absorb, up to a certain point. This is what is meant by a saturation dive. Your body is fully saturated with as much extra gasses as it can hold at whatever depth you're at, working there longer doesn't make you absorb any additional gasses, so the ascent takes the same amount of time, no matter how much additional time you spend at depth.
So, in a saturation dive, you exit the water to a chamber which is at THE SAME pressure as the surrounding water. Which means from a pressure perspective, you don't ascend. You're just getting out of the water. You sit inside the chamber, have some lunch, get some sleep, whatever. You can go back and forth between the chamber and the water without waiting for any decompression.
But with their setup, you exit the water into the moon pool, then go into the Entry lock, where the pressure is adjusted to surface level pressure (ascending). But remember how this can take hours? You're stuck inside the Entry lock, and no one can go in or out of it until you're done.
80 feet isn't horribly deep. You can stay down for 40 minutes and ascend directly, without having to decompress at all. But 8 hours at 80 feet puts you at almost 6 hours of decompression time. seriously.
I read a lot about space, and am a scuba diver, here's my take.
First, diving to 100 meters is going to be fairly dangerous, certainly not something your typical sport diver would do. Beyond 100 feet, you'll increasingly have issues with nitrogen narcosis (you feel drunk), and you'll definitely be in the realm of exotic air mixes (helium instead of Nitrogen, less than surface amounts of O2, etc...). At 100m using normal air, your partial pressure (think concentration) of O2 is 180% of surface level (been a while since I had to do that sort of math), which would be poisonous. Lets just compare to 100 FEET of depth, which a sport diver might do. You could remain at that depth for 10-15 minutes without having to decompress. Stay longer, and you need to sit at depth (say 20 feet) for a while to let the air dissolved in your blood to slowly come out of solution. Go up too fast and it's like opening a bottle of pop, but in your blood. Those bubbles can get caught in your joints, or worse spine, and cause paralysis. Divers that DO engage in deep diving are doing technical diving. Most of the gear is the same as a sport diver, you just carry more of it, particularly tanks and regulators.
But space is worse. First, space suits don't run at normal air pressure, they're down around 4.3 PSI (normal earth is 15). The ISS runs at the same pressure as earth, so donning a space suit is the same as rising UP from depth while diving, you'd get the bends as soon as you open the hatch and exit the ISS (opening the pop bottle). To solve this, when doing an EVA, astronauts breathe 100% O2 for an hour before donning and exiting the ISS.
Second, you have all sorts of cooling issues in space. Your body gives off a lot of heat, and in space, there is no place for that heat to go, so the cooling systems are far more elaborate than any warming systems (often just a hose with hot water being piped down from the surface if you were commercial diving) you might use underwater.
My brother has a normal insulin pump. They work by continuously pumping in "fast acting" insulin into you (the basal rate), if you eat a meal, you have to calculate by hand the amount of extra insulin needed and press buttons on the unit to deliver the required amount. And yes, it knows that at different times of the day, you need more insulin than others. This is totally separate from the slow acting insulin that type 2 users sometimes take an injection of once or twice a day. If for whatever reason, the insulin delivery doesn't work properly, he'll start to have problems quickly, under a couple hours.
His also has a blood meter which starts beeping if his insulin level falls below a certain level. What his pump doesn't do is automatically change the amount of insulin delivered on the fly. Any change in insulin delivery has to be programmed. If he eats an apple, he has to press buttons to dose himself. If his body chemistry changes and that basal rate needs to be adjusted, it has to be programmed. My understanding from him is that the blood glucose measurement isn't especially accurate, though I can't remember why.
This is just the next generation of those same components. The generation after this, expect to see a unit that does a lot more dosing automatically. I think the technology is there, we just need to clear the regulatory hurdles.
Old schools are generally closed for a reason. Declining attendance comes hand in hand with reduced tax roll, which means less money for maintenance. Even a relatively new school building needs a lot of maintenance. But usually, they're closing OLD schools that require roofs and countless other maintenance items. Asbestos, giant boilers that don't pass safety inspections, etc... I've done work in a school that still has a significant amount of coal sitting in the basement.
Remember these buildings aren't just a big version of your house. You might wire up a new outlet in your house, but you probably don't have the tools or know-how to core 2 foot thick concrete walls or work with 440 volt feeder lines, pneumatically actuated steam radiators or commercial fire alarm systems.
I'm hardly a weapons instructor or member of law enforcement, but this advice goes against just about everything I know.
- You won't open the door at all if there is a bad guy outside.
- You do need practice, a dozen rounds a year against clay pigeons is a waste. If you actually intend to defend yourself, take a shooting defense course, take several.
- Firing a weapon outdoors is far different than indoors; exposing the family to proper gun safety is a good idea, but outdoor != enclosed space at night.
- Pistol grip... Eh, you can aim and handle recoil far better with a shoulder fired weapon. Again, practice matters here.
- Most bad guys will take off as soon as they realize they have a chance of being caught. Racking a shotgun may scare away someone intent on doing you harm, but the guy there to take your stereo will scram if you flip a light switch.
The main point here is that if you ever have to defend yourself, you're going to be scared, probably in the dark, and probably having not handled your firearm in quite some time. Think quickly, where is the trunk release on your wife's car? Ok, it's dark; which is the SAFE position on your shotgun's safety? If you actually want to effectively defend yourself, you have to understand the most likely scenario under which that will occur. No amount of advice on any web site or book will take the place of regular training and practice.
The camera isn't exactly unprotected. It's a GoPro Hero, which comes with a fairly thick acrylic case. They're designed to be attached to all sorts of stuff for extreme sports. Among other things, they're water proof to 180 feet.
Palm Pre was my first smartphone, so perhaps I'm biased. But the user interface was far superior to andoid or iphone. It is just more intuitive to use, and easier to open apps and manage multiple open applications.
Palm failed due to underpowered hardware. Sprint was the first big carrier, they released the underpowered pre, then nothing to replace it. Pre 2 was never released in the US ( I don't think), same with Pre 3. The real story of the failure of webOS is really about the lack of hardware.
What?
My old palm pre is on my desk right now, it operates in airplane mode and works just fine, with no cell plan at all. My data usage was less under palm as compared to my verizon android phone, though I suspect this is because there are more free ad supported apps on android.
I've worked with schools for years, and can point out some things that may help.
First, if the school is in a poorer area, check out your E-Rate eligibility. In some cases, you can pay 10 cents on the dollar for technology. Among the eligible technology would be video streaming, such as vbrick.
The vbrick units are highly scriptable, and you can ( and I have ) programmed them to do as follows:
- user hits the button, as in a physical button on their desk or the wall or whatever
- system records for x minutes
- system uploads video to VOD server
- VOD publishes video to public web server
Yes, you can even have an "on-air" light turn on when the system is recording.
Later on, you can add tags or other information on which people can search your content. You can attach documents, or links to other web-based content. So your video of a lesson has the associated homework, plus link to your states' DOE standards web site or whatever else you want. It can be integrated with moodle or similar systems. You can limit access to video by username/password and/or by IP address. If you want, videos recorded in the high school can be limited to specific users and/or IPs, so lets say the 2nd graders can't watch the sex-ed class. Likewise, you can limit videos on the public internet to your low bit-rate content only.
The critical part here is ease of use. Teachers are asked to do more and more with no new resources. If your solution consists of login to this, click that, then this, etc.... it simply won't get used except maybe by a couple tech-savvy teachers. Of course when those people leave or change positions, your project dies. Then your well intentioned project becomes just another expensive boondoggle. In some ways, spending MORE on a project will guarantee success. Administration may let a 10K project disappear, but probably not a 100K project.
As I tell my customers when they ask, "You can't fix behavioral issues with technology." If employees want to waste time instead of working, they can surf the web or send chain emails. Take that away, they can play solitaire. Take that away, they can gab around the water cooler or stare into space and day-dream. Blocking porn and gambling sites is probably a good idea for liability purposes, but I can't see that it helps productivity.
Most frequently I'm asked to look at log files or email and tell employers things that I simply cannot know. I can tell them that an employee didn't log in to their PC until 10am, but I have no way of knowing when they actually arrived at work.
I wrote a very simple extension for my own mediawiki site that pulled in external pages as an iframe within a wiki page.
I'd imagine you can do the same, Build your own wiki, with the wikipedia pages included below your own content.
Yes, there is a product, computrace makes a product that is installed at the BIOS level on a lot of corporate level laptops. Even if you replace the hard drive, it reinstalls itself.
Ditch deep freeze, microsoft has a lesser known and free substitute which is smart enough to allow windows updates or antivirus updates to work properly, but freeze the remainder of the system.
And yes, it is a huge pain. Much more so if you realize that most organizations who'd consider power usage as a significant amount of their bottom line probably have hundreds if not thousands of PCs.
Cisco has been quietly working towards this for a while. You can get a server module for the lowly 1800 series router.
For large networks and satellite office, you have a server or 2, a phone system, network gear, maybe some video surveillance gear. They'll walk into the CIO's office and say:
"you have all this gear from different vendors, with different support contracts and different departments finger pointing when problems arise."
"Now here is the cisco way, one box, one department, one vendor to call. Stick it in a closet and forget about it. Let us show you all our management tools which show everything in a single pane of glass"
If they do it right, it'll make for a very slick demo.
This is their attempt to do the same in the datacenter.
This pops up on slashdot every couple of months. Let me outline the reasons this is difficult from the perspective of one school. It sounds like you're trying to push forward an unfunded mandate. You're going to get a lot of pushback once people realize what you're trying to do.
- Apps. Educational software is often poorly written, and is written for mac and windows, not linux. One of the k-12 schools I work with has 350 applications, perhaps 330 which would have to be replaced under your plan. The K-5 students don't use openoffice, they use Reader Rabbit, there is no OSS substitute, and forget about making it work under wine. 6-12 use some generic office type apps, but also educational software. Keep in mind that entire curriculum and courses are sometimes tied to an app. You're not just replacing an app, you're asking teachers to re-write their curriculum. We're not just talking about typing software, we need software that keeps track of students performance and can run reports showing progress, comparing classes, etc...
- Hardware. IT budgets in schools are often small. You can get E-Rate money for some servers and network gear, but printers, digital cams, etc... are often old. Will your hardware work with Linux? What about the hardware your teachers use without your knowledge. Can you afford to replace it? If you replace old printers, you'll end up throwing away all your stock of ink, plus the ink you didn't know the teachers were hoarding. Some hardware is directly tied to an app for a class, you'll have to throw it away, you run into the same curriculum issues as with the software.
- Support. You'll need to support it. This means replacing or training your existing (unionized) staff. My experience is that schools typically employee underqualified staff. Clicking on things is rough, editing text files is really rough. If the staff can't handle the new tasks, can you replace them? This is a union and politics problem, and not an easy one.
- Training. You need to retrain teachers and staff. You'll again run into union issues, teachers are only required to do x hours of professional development per year, they simply won't take training classes, no matter how easy you make it. Keep in mind that teachers are continually asked to do more work with the same or less time/money, and you'll be asking them to relearn to do things. You might not be making any friends here.
Here how this does work, it'll take a few years...
First, do your TCO studies, show how there are no licensing issues. Licensing is a huge headache, solving that issue will win you friends it makes rolling out apps faster. Make sure the administration is onboard and working toward your goal. Doing all this is pointless if the superintendent comes back from a conference and decrees that everyone should have application X, which only works under Windows.
Modify your technology plan to require that any purchased software is web based and standards compliant. I've worked with "web based" apps that only work on IE, or require special plugins and etc... You'll end up losing a lot of functionality.
Take existing apps for which there are no good web based substitutes and see if they work with wine.
Roll out both of the above to one or two labs. Run them that way for at least a month. Make sure that your lab has an assigned lab aide, someone who takes ownership of the lab and is physically present when classes are using it. Keep on top of things, people probably won't report problems. When there are problems, solve them quickly.
The problem is that software is often written by companies who have an educational base, not a software development base. It's also often very, very old. Lets face it, your core K-6 education has changed very little. Kids still need the 3 R's. The primary app for this level of education at the school I mentioned above was last updated in 2001, and the core educational components are significantly older than that.
But, there are other factors involved. A school might have more than one app that does the same thing. Why? They get grants, and state funding, and federal funding, and a volunteer donates a couple copies. None of those people talk to each other, and even if they did, you'd end up with a committee of 2 dozen people, nothing would ever get done.
You'd think that even on the administrative side, things would be similar. But no. There are only a few companies who make software to track attendance and grading. But there is a huge amount of customization which goes into this software, because each district tracks information differently, and reports to the State differently.
You also have to keep in mind how schools buy things. If a fantastic new learning package came out that schools all over were using, each school would have to justify that purchase. There would probably be a bond initiative. You'd have to explain to voters how product X is going to replace product Y you just had them vote on 5 years ago. In the software world, 5 years is a lifetime. In the voting on a tax increase world, not so much.
You also have to remember that teachers don't like change. They're being asked to do more and more with little compensation. The NCLB act is horrible. So much time is spent teaching to pass tests instead of teaching to learn and think. You're asking them to learn something new, again. You can send them to professional development, but chances are, their contract specifies they're only required to do x hours a year (probably 40). Why should they spend 1/4 of that time re-learning things they already knew how to do instead of learning better teaching which might directly impact education.
The thing that might work is the web. With google docs and all, we're already moving that way. A lot of schools use apps like Plato or e-chalk, which are entirely web based. Get everything on the web. Make it so the school can host the software itself on appliances (capitol cost vs ongoing, e-rate, etc...). Then the client doesn't matter. You can replace your windows desktops with a linux desktop, still running firefox, and there will be little difference.
Anyway, that's my piece. It'd be nice if the problem were simple, it isn't.
One of my customers is a K-12 school. They have 10K students, and 390 different windows applications.
Most educational software simply isn't written for Linux. Most educational software is poorly written for Windows. Running as a non-admin user is always a hangup. I can't imagine trying to get all these apps to run under Wine. The chorus of "why don't we have windows" would be deafening.
The reason Windows beats Linux in schools is because the apps they need, work under windows. When the superintendent wants an application, he gets it. No matter how poorly written or insecure it is, we always end up installing it. If linux is somehow responsible for it not working, linux gets tossed, 100% of the time.
Slashdot Mirror
We have a replacement, it's called TESS https://tess.mit.edu/ It's not quite the same as Kepler, but has a similar mission. Good news is TESS's imaging sensors cover a LOT more area than Kepler.
I was just talking about this the other day with some co-workers. It used to be that you could manage your work network, even a decently large network, and know everything about it in your head. Reading a manual and being a smart guy (or gal) was enough to have a working environment.
No more. People expect remote access and that everything should be working 24x7, the added complexity of building out those environments, and the merging of multiple technologies means that every change becomes a much more complex endeavor. Encryption requirements makes everything more difficult to implement and troubleshoot. There are caveats with virtually everything, and I just don't have the time to be an expert on everything around me.
Example from this year - my IP phone system, which integrates with Exchange using custom nonesense for playback in outlook, using the LLDP enabled voice VLAN on my switches, with servers running on my vmware hosts, each of which have multiple redundant connections, with handsets connected to a switch using 802.1x authentication, that's complex enough as it is, but then buried deep in the release notes was a bullet point that exchange 2013 wasn't supported, 18 months after exchange 2013 was released. That's a lot of stuff to be an expert in; a far cry from 10/100 hubs with a single management IP address and a stand alone server that send voicemail over encrypted SMTP.
Radiolab did an episode about Patient Zero http://www.radiolab.org/story/...
Not just AD, but group policy, which is a decent GUI that lets you install software and push settings down to computers, users and groups. When you need to modify security settings on 5000 PCs it's pretty painless to do so. Er, most of the time
I get maybe 3 calls a week, used to be a lot more. It's either credit card scams or offering drugs to senior citizens. I put them on speaker phone, and continue with whatever I'm doing and just babble nonesense at the people on the phone. I figure my cell phone minutes are free, so I can save someone else who might fall for the scam.
The Internet archive https://archive.org/details/TheInternetsOwnBoyTheStoryOfAaronSwartz
Their compression setup makes absolutely no sense to me. The wikipedia article is either wrong, or someone doesn't know what they're doing. When you dive, your body absorbs gasses into your bloodstream. You have to ascend slowly to let the gasses out. Ascend too quickly, and it's like opening a soda bottle in your blood. With a deep dive (say 300 feet), that could take hours. The longer/the deeper you go, the more gasses you absorb, up to a certain point. This is what is meant by a saturation dive. Your body is fully saturated with as much extra gasses as it can hold at whatever depth you're at, working there longer doesn't make you absorb any additional gasses, so the ascent takes the same amount of time, no matter how much additional time you spend at depth.
So, in a saturation dive, you exit the water to a chamber which is at THE SAME pressure as the surrounding water. Which means from a pressure perspective, you don't ascend. You're just getting out of the water. You sit inside the chamber, have some lunch, get some sleep, whatever. You can go back and forth between the chamber and the water without waiting for any decompression.
But with their setup, you exit the water into the moon pool, then go into the Entry lock, where the pressure is adjusted to surface level pressure (ascending). But remember how this can take hours? You're stuck inside the Entry lock, and no one can go in or out of it until you're done.
80 feet isn't horribly deep. You can stay down for 40 minutes and ascend directly, without having to decompress at all. But 8 hours at 80 feet puts you at almost 6 hours of decompression time. seriously.
I read a lot about space, and am a scuba diver, here's my take.
First, diving to 100 meters is going to be fairly dangerous, certainly not something your typical sport diver would do. Beyond 100 feet, you'll increasingly have issues with nitrogen narcosis (you feel drunk), and you'll definitely be in the realm of exotic air mixes (helium instead of Nitrogen, less than surface amounts of O2, etc...). At 100m using normal air, your partial pressure (think concentration) of O2 is 180% of surface level (been a while since I had to do that sort of math), which would be poisonous. Lets just compare to 100 FEET of depth, which a sport diver might do. You could remain at that depth for 10-15 minutes without having to decompress. Stay longer, and you need to sit at depth (say 20 feet) for a while to let the air dissolved in your blood to slowly come out of solution. Go up too fast and it's like opening a bottle of pop, but in your blood. Those bubbles can get caught in your joints, or worse spine, and cause paralysis. Divers that DO engage in deep diving are doing technical diving. Most of the gear is the same as a sport diver, you just carry more of it, particularly tanks and regulators.
But space is worse. First, space suits don't run at normal air pressure, they're down around 4.3 PSI (normal earth is 15). The ISS runs at the same pressure as earth, so donning a space suit is the same as rising UP from depth while diving, you'd get the bends as soon as you open the hatch and exit the ISS (opening the pop bottle). To solve this, when doing an EVA, astronauts breathe 100% O2 for an hour before donning and exiting the ISS.
Second, you have all sorts of cooling issues in space. Your body gives off a lot of heat, and in space, there is no place for that heat to go, so the cooling systems are far more elaborate than any warming systems (often just a hose with hot water being piped down from the surface if you were commercial diving) you might use underwater.
My brother has a normal insulin pump. They work by continuously pumping in "fast acting" insulin into you (the basal rate), if you eat a meal, you have to calculate by hand the amount of extra insulin needed and press buttons on the unit to deliver the required amount. And yes, it knows that at different times of the day, you need more insulin than others. This is totally separate from the slow acting insulin that type 2 users sometimes take an injection of once or twice a day. If for whatever reason, the insulin delivery doesn't work properly, he'll start to have problems quickly, under a couple hours.
His also has a blood meter which starts beeping if his insulin level falls below a certain level. What his pump doesn't do is automatically change the amount of insulin delivered on the fly. Any change in insulin delivery has to be programmed. If he eats an apple, he has to press buttons to dose himself. If his body chemistry changes and that basal rate needs to be adjusted, it has to be programmed. My understanding from him is that the blood glucose measurement isn't especially accurate, though I can't remember why.
This is just the next generation of those same components. The generation after this, expect to see a unit that does a lot more dosing automatically. I think the technology is there, we just need to clear the regulatory hurdles.
Old schools are generally closed for a reason. Declining attendance comes hand in hand with reduced tax roll, which means less money for maintenance. Even a relatively new school building needs a lot of maintenance. But usually, they're closing OLD schools that require roofs and countless other maintenance items. Asbestos, giant boilers that don't pass safety inspections, etc... I've done work in a school that still has a significant amount of coal sitting in the basement.
Remember these buildings aren't just a big version of your house. You might wire up a new outlet in your house, but you probably don't have the tools or know-how to core 2 foot thick concrete walls or work with 440 volt feeder lines, pneumatically actuated steam radiators or commercial fire alarm systems.
If we can't have drag and drop uploads, a least an easier way to upload and place images into a page.
I'm hardly a weapons instructor or member of law enforcement, but this advice goes against just about everything I know.
- You won't open the door at all if there is a bad guy outside.
- You do need practice, a dozen rounds a year against clay pigeons is a waste. If you actually intend to defend yourself, take a shooting defense course, take several.
- Firing a weapon outdoors is far different than indoors; exposing the family to proper gun safety is a good idea, but outdoor != enclosed space at night.
- Pistol grip... Eh, you can aim and handle recoil far better with a shoulder fired weapon. Again, practice matters here.
- Most bad guys will take off as soon as they realize they have a chance of being caught. Racking a shotgun may scare away someone intent on doing you harm, but the guy there to take your stereo will scram if you flip a light switch.
The main point here is that if you ever have to defend yourself, you're going to be scared, probably in the dark, and probably having not handled your firearm in quite some time. Think quickly, where is the trunk release on your wife's car? Ok, it's dark; which is the SAFE position on your shotgun's safety? If you actually want to effectively defend yourself, you have to understand the most likely scenario under which that will occur. No amount of advice on any web site or book will take the place of regular training and practice.
The camera isn't exactly unprotected. It's a GoPro Hero, which comes with a fairly thick acrylic case. They're designed to be attached to all sorts of stuff for extreme sports. Among other things, they're water proof to 180 feet.
Palm Pre was my first smartphone, so perhaps I'm biased. But the user interface was far superior to andoid or iphone. It is just more intuitive to use, and easier to open apps and manage multiple open applications.
Palm failed due to underpowered hardware. Sprint was the first big carrier, they released the underpowered pre, then nothing to replace it. Pre 2 was never released in the US ( I don't think), same with Pre 3. The real story of the failure of webOS is really about the lack of hardware.
What?
My old palm pre is on my desk right now, it operates in airplane mode and works just fine, with no cell plan at all. My data usage was less under palm as compared to my verizon android phone, though I suspect this is because there are more free ad supported apps on android.
I've worked with schools for years, and can point out some things that may help. First, if the school is in a poorer area, check out your E-Rate eligibility. In some cases, you can pay 10 cents on the dollar for technology. Among the eligible technology would be video streaming, such as vbrick.
The vbrick units are highly scriptable, and you can ( and I have ) programmed them to do as follows:
- user hits the button, as in a physical button on their desk or the wall or whatever
- system records for x minutes
- system uploads video to VOD server
- VOD publishes video to public web server
Yes, you can even have an "on-air" light turn on when the system is recording.
Later on, you can add tags or other information on which people can search your content. You can attach documents, or links to other web-based content. So your video of a lesson has the associated homework, plus link to your states' DOE standards web site or whatever else you want. It can be integrated with moodle or similar systems. You can limit access to video by username/password and/or by IP address. If you want, videos recorded in the high school can be limited to specific users and/or IPs, so lets say the 2nd graders can't watch the sex-ed class. Likewise, you can limit videos on the public internet to your low bit-rate content only.
The critical part here is ease of use. Teachers are asked to do more and more with no new resources. If your solution consists of login to this, click that, then this, etc.... it simply won't get used except maybe by a couple tech-savvy teachers. Of course when those people leave or change positions, your project dies. Then your well intentioned project becomes just another expensive boondoggle. In some ways, spending MORE on a project will guarantee success. Administration may let a 10K project disappear, but probably not a 100K project.
You made a J-Hook, those are supposed to be part of any properly done structured cable install. Some examples
As I tell my customers when they ask, "You can't fix behavioral issues with technology." If employees want to waste time instead of working, they can surf the web or send chain emails. Take that away, they can play solitaire. Take that away, they can gab around the water cooler or stare into space and day-dream. Blocking porn and gambling sites is probably a good idea for liability purposes, but I can't see that it helps productivity.
Most frequently I'm asked to look at log files or email and tell employers things that I simply cannot know. I can tell them that an employee didn't log in to their PC until 10am, but I have no way of knowing when they actually arrived at work.
I wrote a very simple extension for my own mediawiki site that pulled in external pages as an iframe within a wiki page. I'd imagine you can do the same, Build your own wiki, with the wikipedia pages included below your own content.
Yes, there is a product, computrace makes a product that is installed at the BIOS level on a lot of corporate level laptops. Even if you replace the hard drive, it reinstalls itself.
Ditch deep freeze, microsoft has a lesser known and free substitute which is smart enough to allow windows updates or antivirus updates to work properly, but freeze the remainder of the system.
Steady State.
And yes, it is a huge pain. Much more so if you realize that most organizations who'd consider power usage as a significant amount of their bottom line probably have hundreds if not thousands of PCs.
Cisco has been quietly working towards this for a while. You can get a server module for the lowly 1800 series router.
For large networks and satellite office, you have a server or 2, a phone system, network gear, maybe some video surveillance gear. They'll walk into the CIO's office and say:
"you have all this gear from different vendors, with different support contracts and different departments finger pointing when problems arise."
"Now here is the cisco way, one box, one department, one vendor to call. Stick it in a closet and forget about it. Let us show you all our management tools which show everything in a single pane of glass"
If they do it right, it'll make for a very slick demo.
This is their attempt to do the same in the datacenter.
This pops up on slashdot every couple of months. Let me outline the reasons this is difficult from the perspective of one school. It sounds like you're trying to push forward an unfunded mandate. You're going to get a lot of pushback once people realize what you're trying to do.
- Apps. Educational software is often poorly written, and is written for mac and windows, not linux. One of the k-12 schools I work with has 350 applications, perhaps 330 which would have to be replaced under your plan. The K-5 students don't use openoffice, they use Reader Rabbit, there is no OSS substitute, and forget about making it work under wine. 6-12 use some generic office type apps, but also educational software. Keep in mind that entire curriculum and courses are sometimes tied to an app. You're not just replacing an app, you're asking teachers to re-write their curriculum. We're not just talking about typing software, we need software that keeps track of students performance and can run reports showing progress, comparing classes, etc...
- Hardware. IT budgets in schools are often small. You can get E-Rate money for some servers and network gear, but printers, digital cams, etc... are often old. Will your hardware work with Linux? What about the hardware your teachers use without your knowledge. Can you afford to replace it? If you replace old printers, you'll end up throwing away all your stock of ink, plus the ink you didn't know the teachers were hoarding. Some hardware is directly tied to an app for a class, you'll have to throw it away, you run into the same curriculum issues as with the software.
- Support. You'll need to support it. This means replacing or training your existing (unionized) staff. My experience is that schools typically employee underqualified staff. Clicking on things is rough, editing text files is really rough. If the staff can't handle the new tasks, can you replace them? This is a union and politics problem, and not an easy one.
- Training. You need to retrain teachers and staff. You'll again run into union issues, teachers are only required to do x hours of professional development per year, they simply won't take training classes, no matter how easy you make it. Keep in mind that teachers are continually asked to do more work with the same or less time/money, and you'll be asking them to relearn to do things. You might not be making any friends here.
Here how this does work, it'll take a few years...
First, do your TCO studies, show how there are no licensing issues. Licensing is a huge headache, solving that issue will win you friends it makes rolling out apps faster. Make sure the administration is onboard and working toward your goal. Doing all this is pointless if the superintendent comes back from a conference and decrees that everyone should have application X, which only works under Windows.
Modify your technology plan to require that any purchased software is web based and standards compliant. I've worked with "web based" apps that only work on IE, or require special plugins and etc... You'll end up losing a lot of functionality.
Take existing apps for which there are no good web based substitutes and see if they work with wine.
Roll out both of the above to one or two labs. Run them that way for at least a month. Make sure that your lab has an assigned lab aide, someone who takes ownership of the lab and is physically present when classes are using it. Keep on top of things, people probably won't report problems. When there are problems, solve them quickly.
The problem is that software is often written by companies who have an educational base, not a software development base. It's also often very, very old. Lets face it, your core K-6 education has changed very little. Kids still need the 3 R's. The primary app for this level of education at the school I mentioned above was last updated in 2001, and the core educational components are significantly older than that.
But, there are other factors involved. A school might have more than one app that does the same thing. Why? They get grants, and state funding, and federal funding, and a volunteer donates a couple copies. None of those people talk to each other, and even if they did, you'd end up with a committee of 2 dozen people, nothing would ever get done.
You'd think that even on the administrative side, things would be similar. But no. There are only a few companies who make software to track attendance and grading. But there is a huge amount of customization which goes into this software, because each district tracks information differently, and reports to the State differently.
You also have to keep in mind how schools buy things. If a fantastic new learning package came out that schools all over were using, each school would have to justify that purchase. There would probably be a bond initiative. You'd have to explain to voters how product X is going to replace product Y you just had them vote on 5 years ago. In the software world, 5 years is a lifetime. In the voting on a tax increase world, not so much.
You also have to remember that teachers don't like change. They're being asked to do more and more with little compensation. The NCLB act is horrible. So much time is spent teaching to pass tests instead of teaching to learn and think. You're asking them to learn something new, again. You can send them to professional development, but chances are, their contract specifies they're only required to do x hours a year (probably 40). Why should they spend 1/4 of that time re-learning things they already knew how to do instead of learning better teaching which might directly impact education.
The thing that might work is the web. With google docs and all, we're already moving that way. A lot of schools use apps like Plato or e-chalk, which are entirely web based. Get everything on the web. Make it so the school can host the software itself on appliances (capitol cost vs ongoing, e-rate, etc...). Then the client doesn't matter. You can replace your windows desktops with a linux desktop, still running firefox, and there will be little difference.
Anyway, that's my piece. It'd be nice if the problem were simple, it isn't.
One of my customers is a K-12 school. They have 10K students, and 390 different windows applications.
Most educational software simply isn't written for Linux. Most educational software is poorly written for Windows. Running as a non-admin user is always a hangup. I can't imagine trying to get all these apps to run under Wine. The chorus of "why don't we have windows" would be deafening.
The reason Windows beats Linux in schools is because the apps they need, work under windows. When the superintendent wants an application, he gets it. No matter how poorly written or insecure it is, we always end up installing it. If linux is somehow responsible for it not working, linux gets tossed, 100% of the time.