I won't say too much about who they are...I would like to go back there someday, replace my ex-boss, and clean up that stinkhole.
It is a small town, and the newspaper won't publish anything "inflamatory" (their words) like that. Irrespective, they would do the same thing they did before, when a few people realized that they were open to the world, and were getting their e-mails and files read; they will claim it's been fixed after the expenditure of $50,000 or so by their expert Technical guys. When in fact nothing at all had changed...It's just really sad.
I was involved in a similar situation about 2 years ago. Huge amounts of school information were exposed to the world, and it was all quietly swept under the rug. I was told to keep quiet and to say nothing more of it. I was threatened with termination if I disobeyed. Since I no longer work there, I'm pretty free in saying that their "security system" has a bigger hole than the goatse man. School districts that buy "consultants", which are little more than revolving-door Microsoft salesmen with MCSE's, should be dragged out and shot. All they do is put up a huge line of BS that gets them the sale, then they act like they have done their job. School computer systems are all a total joke.
Desist? I wonder if they will go further than that, since it's going to be hard to prove anything beyond something appearing in a log somewhere. Is downloading music illegal, or just posession? If this was a criminal trial, they'd be a long way from a burden of proof, but again, this is probably a civil matter...
Apple....CHEAPER? I really, really doubt it. Macophiles have always been willing to pay a premium for the "newest" thing from the Big A. I'd think you'd be lucky to get out of the door for less than $5000 for a fully-loaded G5. I think my old iMac's and newer Microtels will run this school just fine, thank you.
So far as I have experience, Plan 9 is the way computers will all be run, someday at least. With everybody having a 50 THz machine on their desktop, obviously everybody doesn't need that speed at once. So if your neighbor that just browses the web doesn't need his CPU cycles, you can use his for your Doom XXVII game. If he needs some, your computer can give them to him. Obviously there are big latency and permissions issues to be solved, but it is very good in principle.
SCO is DYING to be bought out. They're grasping at whatever straws they can find, thinking that IBM the vampire slayer will finally drive a buyout stake through their black heart.
The Microtel machines I have don't have an AGP port...the graphics are all integrated. So bust on upgrading the graphics...the rest of the machine is great though. USB 2.0, Duron 1.1 GHz...for the money they're the best buy in the world.
Sun selling me stuff
on
Sun's Last Stand
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· Score: 3, Informative
Sun has tried to sell me some servers before (this is education, remember)...but in an age of white boxes that do the same thing for a fraction of the cost, I can't really justify it for a small district. They did send me an evaluation of StarOffice (read the article yesterday)...and I might switch some machines over from MS Office...but servers, no way.
It will be interesting to see if all of this embedded icemakers and digital toilets and such will be crashing as much as the Windows CE-powered cars and navigation devices...
I will say that in my experience StarOffice does mangle a good percentage of Word files...but the plain-jane files that high school students make are usually done just fine. I'm in the process of piloting about 25 machines with SO instead of Office. We'll see what the kids and teachers think...
I can't believe my earlier post was modded "Troll" when so many goatse and BSD IS DYING posts get modded up. But that's slashdot modding I guess...I should start ignoring Karma. In any case, I completely agree that they should provide a native OS X version for little extra cost, especially since we've dumped so many thousands of dollars down the toilet over the years for their "service contracts."
I went through the same thing with SurfPatrol/Control on the change from Netware 5 to 6. They wanted almost $10,000 for an "upgrade" when all we wanted to do was install it on a 6 machine. But of course it wouldn't work. And I told them to go goatse themselves, basically, and use Squidguard now.
I would, but the software that some of my users have to use will only run in native 9...running in compatibility mode is "not supported." And the upgrade is $$$.
He's not lying. I have always been shocked at OS 9's inabililty to multitask with any speed. And Appletalk file transfers are dog-slow. It's improved in OS X, but you have that wacky interface to deal with. It drives people nuts that have used the same basic interface since 1985 (Apple menu, Finder, etc...)
That's a great article. Makes you wonder where all of these billions go? Suddenly it's no surprise that the American economy is deflating, the gap between rich and poor is growing by giant leaps, and millions of jobs go to Mexico and India...all while people in this country keep their noses in their local newspaper, with their cellphone to their ear while driving to the suburbs in their SUV.
I believe that we are looking at the unraveling of this country economically and politically. Everybody thinks that the economy is up, the economy is down, whatever. The fact is that we are looking at the organized financial raping of an entire nation, by a few select people. It WILL lead to our collective downfall. But no worry, the Chinese will be there to pick up the pieces and institute a "fair" communist dictatorship.
The Universal Service Program is a sham. Just go look at how many billions people like IBM have shilled out of the public on over-bid projects funded by USAC. It was created to basically hand money to get schools and libraries on the internet. Now it's just a giant payola program for big companies and government agencies, and rife with corruption. I know it first-hand. But I can't imagine a corrupt government program...?
WinRadio has been doing this for years, as least in a reception sense. I had one back in 1996 or so. It's a radio that either plugs in as a PCI card, or can hook up to a serial, USB, or PCMCIA slot. It's a wonderful piece of equipment. Biggest problem: Noise from your computer and/or monitor. But it's manageable, and beats those old fiddly push-button radios by a mile. It's Australian in origin, and since the American dollar is in the dumps don't count on getting one for less than $500 US or so.
Did I mention his name was "Yodl" or something like that? The accent was unmistakably German. I meant no cultural disrepect, but I am making an obervation. Indian customer support people are rude to me. Perhaps the difference is that Dell sells commodity boxes for cheap and Quantum had sold me a $3000 tape drive, and had a call center dedicated to that purpose. But in any case, the Indian at Dell (he told me he was in India) was rude, and the apparent German (maybe Belgian, maybe Sudeten for all I know) was beyond polite and patient.
I have had the experience of talking to Dell tech support recently...it was a nightmare because the guy was hard to understand and very short with me. It seemed very much like a cookie-cutter, move-em-in-move-em-out operation, and I was left very irritated. Oh did I mention the tech support was in India?
Just a few days ago, I had an issue with a Quantum DLT tape drive. I e-mailed their tech support, and got a number to call. I instantly got a guy with a German accent, but who was nonetheless entirely understandable. He was extremely polite, and walked me through the procedure to re-attach a tape leader on the drive. He was patient and even gave me 5 minutes to go get some "known good" tapes. I cannot say I have ever experienced such wonderful tech support before. It's what it should be. I'm not sure if the guy was in Germany or was just German. Irrespective, that's what they should be concentrating on...customer satisfaction, not how cheap they can get some guy to thumb through a trouble tree.
Go to this link and see what people have done already.
Lotsa hacking going on there...the entire GM Engine Computer has been reverse engineered.
I drive a GMC Typhoon...and there are several guys on the "syty list" that have really taken apart the code, and made it possible to change all sorts of things. There is even a programmable box you can use to flip through various programs of timing and fuel.
The people I "spy" on are using school district equipment in a non-school-district-sponsored manner. Just like companies peruse their employee e-mail to find violations of company policy, we scan student outbound e-mails for violations of school policies. Since all of the kids are limited to web-based e-mail, and none are smart enough to do any sort of encryption, my workload is safe. It's pretty benign anyway. Assign snort the task of looking for joe@123webmail.com, and sit back and relax. When Joe sends an e-mail, it will show up as an alert. Not much to do there. Ahhhh, the power of Snort.
That's what I meant by my comments...that "American", as in living in the United States, is beginning to become indistinguishable from the corporate culture of greed. People from around the world are beginning to assume that just since Microsoft and Enron and the RIAA are attempting to put their collective boots on the world's neck, that all American people are too.
Don't forget that this open source project runs on Windows too. Setup will be a bit strange for non-linuxers, but it does work fine. Add the Snortcenter GUI and you're pretty much fully point-and-clickified.
But I prefer the command-line linux version. An interesting use is to track someone's particular e-mails....in a school district it proves valuable if a student is harassing someone, for example. Just set it up to log particular names, and voila...it spits out a daily report of what they've been saying.
I use snort in my network...and it's the fastest, cheapest (!) no-nonsense scanner out there. Beats out anything commercial I've seen, and it's open to boot. I know there's tons of features I never use...Maybe I should buy the book.
Doesn't surprise me about India. The world is really ganging up against Microsoft simply because they're American I think (or perhaps they just act "American"...and fortunately they're doing it in the form of Open Source. Good thing there isn't a European Microsoft...I mean a wholly European, closed-source company that people could go to instead of MS. Sort of like people around the world are turning to the Euro instead of the dollar. What ever happened to that little Indian linux PDA?
Slashdot Mirror
I won't say too much about who they are...I would like to go back there someday, replace my ex-boss, and clean up that stinkhole. It is a small town, and the newspaper won't publish anything "inflamatory" (their words) like that. Irrespective, they would do the same thing they did before, when a few people realized that they were open to the world, and were getting their e-mails and files read; they will claim it's been fixed after the expenditure of $50,000 or so by their expert Technical guys. When in fact nothing at all had changed...It's just really sad.
I was involved in a similar situation about 2 years ago. Huge amounts of school information were exposed to the world, and it was all quietly swept under the rug. I was told to keep quiet and to say nothing more of it. I was threatened with termination if I disobeyed. Since I no longer work there, I'm pretty free in saying that their "security system" has a bigger hole than the goatse man. School districts that buy "consultants", which are little more than revolving-door Microsoft salesmen with MCSE's, should be dragged out and shot. All they do is put up a huge line of BS that gets them the sale, then they act like they have done their job. School computer systems are all a total joke.
Desist? I wonder if they will go further than that, since it's going to be hard to prove anything beyond something appearing in a log somewhere. Is downloading music illegal, or just posession? If this was a criminal trial, they'd be a long way from a burden of proof, but again, this is probably a civil matter...
Apple....CHEAPER? I really, really doubt it. Macophiles have always been willing to pay a premium for the "newest" thing from the Big A. I'd think you'd be lucky to get out of the door for less than $5000 for a fully-loaded G5. I think my old iMac's and newer Microtels will run this school just fine, thank you.
So far as I have experience, Plan 9 is the way computers will all be run, someday at least. With everybody having a 50 THz machine on their desktop, obviously everybody doesn't need that speed at once. So if your neighbor that just browses the web doesn't need his CPU cycles, you can use his for your Doom XXVII game. If he needs some, your computer can give them to him. Obviously there are big latency and permissions issues to be solved, but it is very good in principle.
And those FUD-scared AIX and Linux customers will run where...SCO Unix? Naaah. Windows 2003 maybe?
SCO is DYING to be bought out. They're grasping at whatever straws they can find, thinking that IBM the vampire slayer will finally drive a buyout stake through their black heart.
The Microtel machines I have don't have an AGP port...the graphics are all integrated. So bust on upgrading the graphics...the rest of the machine is great though. USB 2.0, Duron 1.1 GHz...for the money they're the best buy in the world.
Sun has tried to sell me some servers before (this is education, remember)...but in an age of white boxes that do the same thing for a fraction of the cost, I can't really justify it for a small district. They did send me an evaluation of StarOffice (read the article yesterday)...and I might switch some machines over from MS Office...but servers, no way.
It will be interesting to see if all of this embedded icemakers and digital toilets and such will be crashing as much as the Windows CE-powered cars and navigation devices...
I will say that in my experience StarOffice does mangle a good percentage of Word files...but the plain-jane files that high school students make are usually done just fine. I'm in the process of piloting about 25 machines with SO instead of Office. We'll see what the kids and teachers think...
I can't believe my earlier post was modded "Troll" when so many goatse and BSD IS DYING posts get modded up. But that's slashdot modding I guess...I should start ignoring Karma. In any case, I completely agree that they should provide a native OS X version for little extra cost, especially since we've dumped so many thousands of dollars down the toilet over the years for their "service contracts." I went through the same thing with SurfPatrol/Control on the change from Netware 5 to 6. They wanted almost $10,000 for an "upgrade" when all we wanted to do was install it on a 6 machine. But of course it wouldn't work. And I told them to go goatse themselves, basically, and use Squidguard now.
I would, but the software that some of my users have to use will only run in native 9...running in compatibility mode is "not supported." And the upgrade is $$$.
He's not lying. I have always been shocked at OS 9's inabililty to multitask with any speed. And Appletalk file transfers are dog-slow. It's improved in OS X, but you have that wacky interface to deal with. It drives people nuts that have used the same basic interface since 1985 (Apple menu, Finder, etc...)
That's a great article. Makes you wonder where all of these billions go? Suddenly it's no surprise that the American economy is deflating, the gap between rich and poor is growing by giant leaps, and millions of jobs go to Mexico and India...all while people in this country keep their noses in their local newspaper, with their cellphone to their ear while driving to the suburbs in their SUV. I believe that we are looking at the unraveling of this country economically and politically. Everybody thinks that the economy is up, the economy is down, whatever. The fact is that we are looking at the organized financial raping of an entire nation, by a few select people. It WILL lead to our collective downfall. But no worry, the Chinese will be there to pick up the pieces and institute a "fair" communist dictatorship.
The Universal Service Program is a sham. Just go look at how many billions people like IBM have shilled out of the public on over-bid projects funded by USAC. It was created to basically hand money to get schools and libraries on the internet. Now it's just a giant payola program for big companies and government agencies, and rife with corruption. I know it first-hand. But I can't imagine a corrupt government program...?
WinRadio has been doing this for years, as least in a reception sense. I had one back in 1996 or so. It's a radio that either plugs in as a PCI card, or can hook up to a serial, USB, or PCMCIA slot. It's a wonderful piece of equipment. Biggest problem: Noise from your computer and/or monitor. But it's manageable, and beats those old fiddly push-button radios by a mile. It's Australian in origin, and since the American dollar is in the dumps don't count on getting one for less than $500 US or so.
Did I mention his name was "Yodl" or something like that? The accent was unmistakably German. I meant no cultural disrepect, but I am making an obervation. Indian customer support people are rude to me. Perhaps the difference is that Dell sells commodity boxes for cheap and Quantum had sold me a $3000 tape drive, and had a call center dedicated to that purpose. But in any case, the Indian at Dell (he told me he was in India) was rude, and the apparent German (maybe Belgian, maybe Sudeten for all I know) was beyond polite and patient.
I have had the experience of talking to Dell tech support recently...it was a nightmare because the guy was hard to understand and very short with me. It seemed very much like a cookie-cutter, move-em-in-move-em-out operation, and I was left very irritated. Oh did I mention the tech support was in India? Just a few days ago, I had an issue with a Quantum DLT tape drive. I e-mailed their tech support, and got a number to call. I instantly got a guy with a German accent, but who was nonetheless entirely understandable. He was extremely polite, and walked me through the procedure to re-attach a tape leader on the drive. He was patient and even gave me 5 minutes to go get some "known good" tapes. I cannot say I have ever experienced such wonderful tech support before. It's what it should be. I'm not sure if the guy was in Germany or was just German. Irrespective, that's what they should be concentrating on...customer satisfaction, not how cheap they can get some guy to thumb through a trouble tree.
Go to this link and see what people have done already. Lotsa hacking going on there...the entire GM Engine Computer has been reverse engineered. I drive a GMC Typhoon...and there are several guys on the "syty list" that have really taken apart the code, and made it possible to change all sorts of things. There is even a programmable box you can use to flip through various programs of timing and fuel.
The people I "spy" on are using school district equipment in a non-school-district-sponsored manner. Just like companies peruse their employee e-mail to find violations of company policy, we scan student outbound e-mails for violations of school policies. Since all of the kids are limited to web-based e-mail, and none are smart enough to do any sort of encryption, my workload is safe. It's pretty benign anyway. Assign snort the task of looking for joe@123webmail.com, and sit back and relax. When Joe sends an e-mail, it will show up as an alert. Not much to do there. Ahhhh, the power of Snort.
That's what I meant by my comments...that "American", as in living in the United States, is beginning to become indistinguishable from the corporate culture of greed. People from around the world are beginning to assume that just since Microsoft and Enron and the RIAA are attempting to put their collective boots on the world's neck, that all American people are too.
Don't forget that this open source project runs on Windows too. Setup will be a bit strange for non-linuxers, but it does work fine. Add the Snortcenter GUI and you're pretty much fully point-and-clickified. But I prefer the command-line linux version. An interesting use is to track someone's particular e-mails....in a school district it proves valuable if a student is harassing someone, for example. Just set it up to log particular names, and voila...it spits out a daily report of what they've been saying.
I use snort in my network...and it's the fastest, cheapest (!) no-nonsense scanner out there. Beats out anything commercial I've seen, and it's open to boot. I know there's tons of features I never use...Maybe I should buy the book.
Doesn't surprise me about India. The world is really ganging up against Microsoft simply because they're American I think (or perhaps they just act "American"...and fortunately they're doing it in the form of Open Source. Good thing there isn't a European Microsoft...I mean a wholly European, closed-source company that people could go to instead of MS. Sort of like people around the world are turning to the Euro instead of the dollar. What ever happened to that little Indian linux PDA?