You assume that I'm a person who regularly complains about how much they pay in taxes and that is far from accurate for myself. Personally I would love to see additional funding for schools. I've got two kids in public schools right now and can fully appreciate the financial difficulties the schools face. Two things I'd like to see in the school system are reduction of waste (any organization has this) and increased funding (new schools, teacher salaries, newer equipment). My wife and I are both fairly involved in the community too. We volunteer time to assist the teachers and are involved in various other community activities as well. I do feel that I am doing the responsible "thing" to help out.
You want the school to provide a variety of computers, it's going to cost money. You tell me, where are you going to get that money from?
I'd say the funding will come through the same channels that the IT budget already comes through. The real question is what are the schools requesting (you can't get what you don't ask for)?
Schools have budgets. Most of them have limited budgets.
I think we all know that funding is limited. I'm not saying that schools need to purchase "top of the line" equipment, but having a variety would benefit students. If we only present students with a single operating system in their education, you can guess what operating system they will choose when they get out of school. Why do you think Microsoft is so eager to offer hardware and software that is running on MS Win32 systems as part of their legal settlements? They know that if the students only see their product, they're ensuring that most of them will never consider that other solutions exist.
Just throwing out a question, but does anyone think that schools are supporting the MS monopoly by only providing access to MS Win32 systems? If other options were presented, wouldn't this provide people with a better understanding of alternate solutions when they solve an IT problem? I don't believe a single vendor can provide the total solution to every problem.
When you can pick up a cheap windows desktop for $500, its hard to justify a Mac.
This might be true for the home consumer, but when in the business world, you use the best tool for the job. The cost of the hardware and operating system really hasn't been significant in the purchasing decision (all within reason of course), at least by my experience. Schools should be responsible enough to provide a variety of hardware/software/operating systems to properly prepare it's students.
The Oracle customers I deal with tend to go for enterprise licenses anyways so I don't believe the multi-core chips will affect them too much. As for non-enterprise customers, they've had choices for quite a while and many still choose Oracle, even though cheaper, or free, options exist. If Oracle does radically change their pricing though, I can see customers moving away, but I'm sure Oracle (as well as other vendors) will keep this in mind when they address pricing models.
Thanks for the update. Last time I had checked DeeGree they didn't have the WFS-T capabilities. The WFS-T capabilities appear to be fairly new as of April 2004 so I guess I'll be evaluating it again.
I actually do R&D work for LMCO (not related to this particular project) but my work is completely internal R&D. My understanding of the IP ownership depends on the development details:
If done at contractor site, under contractor funding, for possible contract win, contractor retains IP rights
If done at contractor site, under government funding, IP may or may not be owned by contractor depending on contract details
If done at government site by contractor, under government funding or joint government/contractor funding, generally IP is retained by government but agreement can be made to transfer to contractor
If using government equipment, it seems that the government will retain IP (NOTE: government equipment may only be used for official government directed work so this is typically contract R&D).
Now I haven't actually had to deal with the above personally but one of the more senior co-workers explained it to me a while back so I hope I have it correct. If I have any of it wrong, I'm sure someone will correct me.
I'll have to check it out a bit more but my initial review shows that it does not impliment the WFS Transactional (WFS-T) which I'll need. I'll have to see where they are with WFS-T and maybe my group can develop the code for it. We've already implimented our own internal WFS-T, but it's to an older specification (along with some "short cuts") and I don't think we were looking to maintain it regularly. Maybe we can at a minimum donate some code, but need to check with the managers to see if the company will let it go.
ESRI hasn't truly ported all of ArcGIS to *NIX platforms and I'm not sure that they will. ArcGIS uses COM for it's ArcObjects (which is what ArcGIS and several of the other offerings from ESRI are built on) and for ArcIMS they have included a COM application for use on UNIX systems to provide limited ArcGIS support (sort of like their "ArcMap Server for ArcIMS" that was only available for ArcIMS 4.x on MS Win32 platforms).
I have been using ESRI products since ArcInfo 6.1 (used on DEC Ultrix back in early 90's) and ESRI seems to pretty much own the GIS market. At my current job, I build/integrate various applications for geospatial/imagery and automated analysis and find that my customers really don't look for anything but the COTS applications with some small amount of "wrapper" code. I'd like to see Open Source GIS suceed, but don't know if it will in the corporate world where several thousand dollars isn't much compared to the time/money spent on working through an Open Source product. Eventually I see Open Source GIS working, but probably not in the next couple of years.
As for ArcGIS, I use it, but find that it runs way too slow. Give me an Arc prompt and I'll be much happier. ArcGIS consumes a good bit of memory and takes way to long to perform operations that were done much faster on the older ArcInfo software on much less of a system (CPU/memory).
Maybe the Open Source products will mature faster if open data formats are fully supported. Unfortunately ESRI only seems to do "lip service" to supporting things like Open GIS Consortium (OGC).
BTW, messed around with Ionic Software's RedSpider and it seems to do a decent job at serving WFS data, but it has a hefty price tag ($50K +). Can anyone recommend a good Open Source WFS/WMS server that can read either Oracle Spatial or ESRI ArcSDE data sources? I've looked at GeoTools and they don't seem to be "there" yet.
The $300K sounds like the labor rate (billable to customers) rather than the actual salary of the employee. After you add all the overhead cost (benefits (health, workers comp, life ins., dental, etc...), indirect billables like meetings and managers, infrastructure (building, utilities, maintenance, etc...), tools (hardware, software, books), training, and many other things) the actual cost to the end consumer is pretty high. Consider the cost for a typical auto mechanic, around where I live, the rate is about $60/hour. The employee is probably drawing a salary around $15 to $20/hour plus benefits. The labor rate will also vary depending on the field and the location of the company. In the DC Metro area, the labor rate multiplier (actual salary * multiplier = billable rate) is probably much higher than some small town in Pennsylvania and I imagine that Redmond has a high multiplier too.
BTW, my billable rate runs at $200K but I make less than half that as my actual salary (not including the various benefits).
I used to work for a county in Maryland and we used a StorageTek robotic tape system with Veritas NetBackup. The solution was pretty expensive but we didn't run into failures.
For smaller drives, I haven't had any real problems with Exabyte or Sony drives or small libraries. Out of these two though, I only remember one Exabyte failing on me and it was fairly old.
Out of curiosity, how are you managing your historic backups? Even with hard disk prices dropping, I can't imagine storing numerous external hard disk for your level 0 backups. Sounds like you are protected against hardware failure with the RAID setup, but if someone deletes/corrupts a file, will you be able to recover that?
Sure IT is responsible for configuring secure systems and applying updates, but most people would agree that MS hasn't exactly made an IT workers life easy. I'm not saying that the job should be "easy" as in they sit around all day, but applying patches shouldn't consume a large chunk of your time nor should it require more IT employees to actually accomplish the repeated patching.
I'm not opposed to running a mixed environment (select the proper tool for the job) but MS tends to make a large target that is easy to hit.
The really secure places go even further by performing physical checks (scan device, inspection of containers (purse, case, lunch bags, etc...), dogs, etc...). They'll also perform random inspections as you move about a facility.
In addition to the above security methods, the disabling of hardware is another method to limit data risk. We disable removable media devices, and just about any non-essential service, on sensitive equipment. Your also not protecting just from theft, but also from corruption of the system. My company found that the viruses coming into the network were all from people accessing personal systems (example: web based email (Hotmail, Yahoo, your ISP, etc...) and personal devices (iPods, PDAs, etc...) are prohibited from being attached to any device on the corporate or customer networks.
While the technology is getting smaller and the capacity is increasing, our security and IT folks are looking at procedures to limit system risk for both theft and corruption. Depending on the sensitivity of your systems/data, don't be surprised if you start seeing policies and procedures being created to prevent these types of devices getting access to corporate resources.
This is just another example of a stupid law or policy that does nothing to prevent theft, but inconveniences the honest people.
I don't know if I would consider this a "law", but policy is probably the correct term. This will inconvenience the honest person, but even an honest person can be tempted to "copy" applications or data if they don't see that it will harm anyone. How many people take a copy of code they developed from a previous employer without thinking much about it. In a simple case, this probably doesn't harm the employer who paid your salary while you developed the code. In more complex cases, you can find yourself in some serious legal trouble if what was copied is something very sensitive.
Because Redhat and SuSE are the only distros of linux out there.
I guess you missed the line that said: And you can find many other distributions for various prices including free.
Listing all the possible distributions would have been overkill. I listed an example of the distributions for comparison. Should I include other operating systems too? What then about Solaris x86, OS X, etc...?
I realize that you can get MS Win32 systems for a little less, but you can also get Linux for free from many of the distributions. The point is that the recommended prices show MS Win32 generally higher. You also need to consider that these are for a single seat license and if you add a server for MS Win32 systems that you need to have CAL's which can really start to add up. I know that the more commercial versions of Linux also have server pricing, but again, you can get some of these for free too.
As to PriceWatch showing prices, what your really seeing is a pass through to vendors that register with PriceWatch. Linux solutions tend to go through other channels, but I'd guess if you check some of the companies that post to PriceWatch, I'm sure you'd find that some offer Linux solutions, but haven't posted them.
Overall though, the price of the OS is a small part of the TCO when considering software. At the company I work at, they spend more money on the process to get software rather than the software itself in most cases. By the time that I would write the justification, get manager approval, purchasing reviews and puts out the request or a preferred vendor purchase order, the cost of an item is really insignificant. Maybe at a large volume, the unit price will take effect, but usually large organizations will negotiate very nice prices.
When you really get down to it, the major cost of a system is the ease of operation, integration, deployment, maintenance, and 3rd party vendor support. Hardware is usually not much of a factor unless your starting to look at very large systems. If your looking, for example, at blade servers, Dell, HP, Sun, IBM, etc... all run about the same price until you start scaling them up. Workstations, pretty much the same. Commercial software, again, competitive on the various platforms. You really need to look at the problem and use the best solution (wether UNIX or MS Win32 based).
Suse Professional - Retail Price $89 (U.S.)
And you can find many other distributions for various prices including free.
Usability is really defined by what you intend to use the sytem for. As a common system, it is probably missing some of the functionality you would find on a MS Win32 system. For most of the common desktop functions, it has most of the features. Where Linuz is suffering is the massive vendor support that MS Win32 systems have. This will change as Linux gains acceptance (recall the days where applications only ran on UNIX systems and eventually vendors started to add MS Win32 support). Drivers also suffer a similar fate.
As for the administrator cost, the TCO is debatable. The company I work for pays basically the same rates for administrators on either platform. This also applies to any of my previous employers (although skills with MS Exchange and Active Directory seem to demand higher prices than the equivilent skilled workers on UNIX systems).
I agree that filters may not be the most effective tool, but they can be useful, particularly in preventing accidental viewing of some of the more extreme material on the web. The first example I can think of would be something like the whitehouse.com vs whitehouse.gov (I don't know if this is still a problem).
As far as the long term approach, if I'm trying to filter when they are in their mid-teens, likely I messed up when they were younger. In my opinion, a value system has been instilled at a much younger age. I'm sure that my kids will get a level of curiosity at some point but I don't want to expose them too early.
You missed the point entirely. The parent post I responded to seemed to indicate that installing a filter was side stepping parenting by putting the responsibility on software.
Perhaps you should offer drugs to your children, so that they can learn to resist?
Now why would you think of doing this? Did it work for you or your kids? Come on, nobody would do that. Kids need to be taught the dangers of drugs (and lots of other things), but offering them drugs isn't the approach I would use.
Kids don't need all the temptations of the Internet. Hell, I don't: I installed Dan's Guardian to filter my own browsing.
Kids using the Internet is almost a requirement in schools today. My kids (ages 7 & 10) have both had reports that asked for one Internet resource as part of their reports. Now that doesn't mean you give the kids unlimited access to the Internet because of the content. You could almost look at the Internet as going to the mall. For the most part, the stores are OK for kids to be in. You might want to "filter" them to not go into a "Spencer's", "Victoria Secret", etc... because you don't agree with the content (NOTE: I'm not saying these stores are necessarily bad, but as an example, their goods could be seen as "bad" for young children). Installing a filter for browsing can be useful to keep the "bad" information from showing up in your kids browser. I don't actually have a filter installed on my system but rather I do sit with my kids when they are doing anything in a browser. My kids do enjoy a few of the sites (Barbie, NeoPets, YuGiOh (sp?), Lego, Bionicles, etc...) and once at that site I might let them on their own for a bit. They know how to operate the browser and they also know that if they see anything that they weren't expecting that they are to get myself or my wife immediately. The sites they visit are what we consider acceptable material. Now my son has asked to look for things on Google and we as parents have told him that he can't use that unless we are sitting there with him. For now we trust him to follow our wishes and until he shows that he can't be trusted, we'll continue to give him some level of freedom (in this case we don't "block" him from doing things on the computer).
Or more realistically, take them shopping and then yell at them when they want you to buy them something?
Well telling them that you aren't buying them anything depends on why you went shopping in the first place. If you were going because you needed to pick up some groceries, then you can tell the kids that you aren't buying them anything. If you take them to the store and tell them that you are buying them something, then by all means you should hold to your word.
Back to the topic though, filtering is a tool that parents may choose to use to protect children from information they deem inappropriate. As for using a filter for your own browsing habits("I installed Dan's Guardian to filter my own browsing"), I guess you feel that you can't make a good decision or wish to rely on someone elses opinion (which may or may not match your own). You probably shouldn't allow your children Internet access as you don't seem to be able to protect yourself from the content. My approach is to prepare my kids to judge for themselves, within reason for the age/maturity.
Only if you agree that children don't acquire some rights to control their own reading habits at some point.
I think that if your installing a filter of some sort, you are controlling your kids reading habit. Parental involvement does not necessarily mean physically standing over their shoulders 24/7 though. You need to give children a degree of freedom while protecting them (what you protect them from is up to the individual parents). If you are filtering for your kids 24/7, they likely won't learn how to make decisions for themselves based on the values you have instilled into them. I'm not saying that you don't stay involved with kids but that you have to prepare them for that day when they go out on their own. I do agree that parental involvement is the best filter but it isn't the only way to protect and raise children.
I understand how the process works, but from the common sense side, my father was ultimately responsible. Legally, yeah the company is liable, but I'm just thinking from a practical sense, which doesn't always follow legal sense.
Not sure from a family perspective that I see this (your anonymous post) as funny. In my fathers case, the doctors detected elevated enzymes (which I understand indicate a heart attack), but they were unable to determine exactly when they would have happened. Their findings were inconclusive as to wether it was a heard attack or possibly a seizure or some other condition.
Back to point though, the cause of the accident wasn't exactly what I would consider company related, but the lawyers see it that way.
My father is a plumber and was working for company X. Company X allowed him to use a company truck to take home (commute directly to jobs). One Saturday morning on his way to work, he had a medical problem (doctors were inconclusive if it was a heart attack, but they know something happened) that caused him to lose conciousness at the wheel. He went through a red light and killed a passenger in another vehicle. Now because he was in a company vehicle, the legal action was against company X rather than my father. Being that he was driving to a job site in the company vehicle, the company was liable. While financially I'm glad that my parents didn't have a direct cost to them (other than the legal side resulting in legal fees, probation, and court/probation cost), I don't believe it was really fair that the company bears the cost (insurance mostly, but still the rates are way up).
Being Orkut is acting as an agent of Google, unfortunately the company is liable. Logically though the blame should fall on the individual, but targeting the company and the individual seems to be the legal approach.
The device is rather expensive ($8K) and you'll need high-end graphics cards, but they produce nice results. A company produced a solution that used 4 Dell PCs, 3 of these panels (driven by 3 of the Dells), and one plasma screen (driven by 1 Dell and it combined the results of the 3 panels to show an overview) to create a cockpit for fly through scenes. Quite an impressive demo, but very expensive.
We also used a couple of these as the second head to a dual head workstation setup for geospatial demonstrations. Using it as a second display can be tricky, moving windows from screen to screen. Applications also seemed to perform slowly on that screen (video card wasn't quite ready for this level, but was the one recommended by IBM staff).
Personally, until these come down in price and graphics cards adequately handle all applications, I'll go for several panel displays (see this interesting one from Panoramtech for a "cockpit" like display).
I do shut my systems down when not in use. The boot/shutdown procedure isn't all the long and it does save on the electricity bill. As for adware/malware, I actively maintain the systems with current patches and security software and I keep the accounts to a minimum priviledge level (especially with the kids).
So how much could spam be reduced by people shutting down their PCs overnight/when they're at work?
While this could reduce the volume of SPAM, it is not necessarily the correct process for reduction. One should really correct their system so that it isn't acting as a "zombie". By ISPs disconnecting them and only reconnecting after the owner has repaired the system, the "zombie" SPAM should go away.
target the business using the spammer to advertize
While I generally agree with this approach, one could also see where this would be abused. SPAM could be sent out advertising a company without the company being involved at all, just to get the company in trouble. An example:
Spammer "X" is upset with the local bank for turning down their credit application. Spammer "X" decides to get revenge by creating a SPAM message that appears to be from the local bank. Email has valid links to the local bank and is sent to millions of email addresses. Receivers of the email complain that some bank is SPAMMING them.
Now likely the local bank would be able to prove that they haven't arranged for SPAM advertisement, but that doesn't help the bank from a consumer perspective.
I'm not against trying this, but the process is not without problems. I'm really hoping that the "zombie" systems are disconnected by ISPs to reduce the amount of spam mailing systems out there. If we can eliminate SPAMMERs ability to send anonymously, some of the anti-spam products will likely work better (mainly thinking of the list-based solutions).
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You assume that I'm a person who regularly complains about how much they pay in taxes and that is far from accurate for myself. Personally I would love to see additional funding for schools. I've got two kids in public schools right now and can fully appreciate the financial difficulties the schools face. Two things I'd like to see in the school system are reduction of waste (any organization has this) and increased funding (new schools, teacher salaries, newer equipment). My wife and I are both fairly involved in the community too. We volunteer time to assist the teachers and are involved in various other community activities as well. I do feel that I am doing the responsible "thing" to help out.
You want the school to provide a variety of computers, it's going to cost money. You tell me, where are you going to get that money from?
I'd say the funding will come through the same channels that the IT budget already comes through. The real question is what are the schools requesting (you can't get what you don't ask for)?
Schools have budgets. Most of them have limited budgets.
I think we all know that funding is limited. I'm not saying that schools need to purchase "top of the line" equipment, but having a variety would benefit students. If we only present students with a single operating system in their education, you can guess what operating system they will choose when they get out of school. Why do you think Microsoft is so eager to offer hardware and software that is running on MS Win32 systems as part of their legal settlements? They know that if the students only see their product, they're ensuring that most of them will never consider that other solutions exist.
Just throwing out a question, but does anyone think that schools are supporting the MS monopoly by only providing access to MS Win32 systems? If other options were presented, wouldn't this provide people with a better understanding of alternate solutions when they solve an IT problem? I don't believe a single vendor can provide the total solution to every problem.
When you can pick up a cheap windows desktop for $500, its hard to justify a Mac.
This might be true for the home consumer, but when in the business world, you use the best tool for the job. The cost of the hardware and operating system really hasn't been significant in the purchasing decision (all within reason of course), at least by my experience. Schools should be responsible enough to provide a variety of hardware/software/operating systems to properly prepare it's students.
Just picturing from "Demolition Man" where all restaraunts are "Taco Bell".
The Oracle customers I deal with tend to go for enterprise licenses anyways so I don't believe the multi-core chips will affect them too much. As for non-enterprise customers, they've had choices for quite a while and many still choose Oracle, even though cheaper, or free, options exist. If Oracle does radically change their pricing though, I can see customers moving away, but I'm sure Oracle (as well as other vendors) will keep this in mind when they address pricing models.
Thanks for the update. Last time I had checked DeeGree they didn't have the WFS-T capabilities. The WFS-T capabilities appear to be fairly new as of April 2004 so I guess I'll be evaluating it again.
If done at contractor site, under contractor funding, for possible contract win, contractor retains IP rights
If done at contractor site, under government funding, IP may or may not be owned by contractor depending on contract details
If done at government site by contractor, under government funding or joint government/contractor funding, generally IP is retained by government but agreement can be made to transfer to contractor
If using government equipment, it seems that the government will retain IP (NOTE: government equipment may only be used for official government directed work so this is typically contract R&D).
Now I haven't actually had to deal with the above personally but one of the more senior co-workers explained it to me a while back so I hope I have it correct. If I have any of it wrong, I'm sure someone will correct me.
Jim
I'll have to check it out a bit more but my initial review shows that it does not impliment the WFS Transactional (WFS-T) which I'll need. I'll have to see where they are with WFS-T and maybe my group can develop the code for it. We've already implimented our own internal WFS-T, but it's to an older specification (along with some "short cuts") and I don't think we were looking to maintain it regularly. Maybe we can at a minimum donate some code, but need to check with the managers to see if the company will let it go.
Thanks for the tip.
ESRI hasn't truly ported all of ArcGIS to *NIX platforms and I'm not sure that they will. ArcGIS uses COM for it's ArcObjects (which is what ArcGIS and several of the other offerings from ESRI are built on) and for ArcIMS they have included a COM application for use on UNIX systems to provide limited ArcGIS support (sort of like their "ArcMap Server for ArcIMS" that was only available for ArcIMS 4.x on MS Win32 platforms).
I have been using ESRI products since ArcInfo 6.1 (used on DEC Ultrix back in early 90's) and ESRI seems to pretty much own the GIS market. At my current job, I build/integrate various applications for geospatial/imagery and automated analysis and find that my customers really don't look for anything but the COTS applications with some small amount of "wrapper" code. I'd like to see Open Source GIS suceed, but don't know if it will in the corporate world where several thousand dollars isn't much compared to the time/money spent on working through an Open Source product. Eventually I see Open Source GIS working, but probably not in the next couple of years.
As for ArcGIS, I use it, but find that it runs way too slow. Give me an Arc prompt and I'll be much happier. ArcGIS consumes a good bit of memory and takes way to long to perform operations that were done much faster on the older ArcInfo software on much less of a system (CPU/memory).
Maybe the Open Source products will mature faster if open data formats are fully supported. Unfortunately ESRI only seems to do "lip service" to supporting things like Open GIS Consortium (OGC).
BTW, messed around with Ionic Software's RedSpider and it seems to do a decent job at serving WFS data, but it has a hefty price tag ($50K +). Can anyone recommend a good Open Source WFS/WMS server that can read either Oracle Spatial or ESRI ArcSDE data sources? I've looked at GeoTools and they don't seem to be "there" yet.
The $300K sounds like the labor rate (billable to customers) rather than the actual salary of the employee. After you add all the overhead cost (benefits (health, workers comp, life ins., dental, etc...), indirect billables like meetings and managers, infrastructure (building, utilities, maintenance, etc...), tools (hardware, software, books), training, and many other things) the actual cost to the end consumer is pretty high. Consider the cost for a typical auto mechanic, around where I live, the rate is about $60/hour. The employee is probably drawing a salary around $15 to $20/hour plus benefits. The labor rate will also vary depending on the field and the location of the company. In the DC Metro area, the labor rate multiplier (actual salary * multiplier = billable rate) is probably much higher than some small town in Pennsylvania and I imagine that Redmond has a high multiplier too.
BTW, my billable rate runs at $200K but I make less than half that as my actual salary (not including the various benefits).
I used to work for a county in Maryland and we used a StorageTek robotic tape system with Veritas NetBackup. The solution was pretty expensive but we didn't run into failures.
For smaller drives, I haven't had any real problems with Exabyte or Sony drives or small libraries. Out of these two though, I only remember one Exabyte failing on me and it was fairly old.
Out of curiosity, how are you managing your historic backups? Even with hard disk prices dropping, I can't imagine storing numerous external hard disk for your level 0 backups. Sounds like you are protected against hardware failure with the RAID setup, but if someone deletes/corrupts a file, will you be able to recover that?
Sure IT is responsible for configuring secure systems and applying updates, but most people would agree that MS hasn't exactly made an IT workers life easy. I'm not saying that the job should be "easy" as in they sit around all day, but applying patches shouldn't consume a large chunk of your time nor should it require more IT employees to actually accomplish the repeated patching.
I'm not opposed to running a mixed environment (select the proper tool for the job) but MS tends to make a large target that is easy to hit.
The really secure places go even further by performing physical checks (scan device, inspection of containers (purse, case, lunch bags, etc...), dogs, etc...). They'll also perform random inspections as you move about a facility.
In addition to the above security methods, the disabling of hardware is another method to limit data risk. We disable removable media devices, and just about any non-essential service, on sensitive equipment. Your also not protecting just from theft, but also from corruption of the system. My company found that the viruses coming into the network were all from people accessing personal systems (example: web based email (Hotmail, Yahoo, your ISP, etc...) and personal devices (iPods, PDAs, etc...) are prohibited from being attached to any device on the corporate or customer networks.
While the technology is getting smaller and the capacity is increasing, our security and IT folks are looking at procedures to limit system risk for both theft and corruption. Depending on the sensitivity of your systems/data, don't be surprised if you start seeing policies and procedures being created to prevent these types of devices getting access to corporate resources.
This is just another example of a stupid law or policy that does nothing to prevent theft, but inconveniences the honest people.
I don't know if I would consider this a "law", but policy is probably the correct term. This will inconvenience the honest person, but even an honest person can be tempted to "copy" applications or data if they don't see that it will harm anyone. How many people take a copy of code they developed from a previous employer without thinking much about it. In a simple case, this probably doesn't harm the employer who paid your salary while you developed the code. In more complex cases, you can find yourself in some serious legal trouble if what was copied is something very sensitive.
Because Redhat and SuSE are the only distros of linux out there.
I guess you missed the line that said: And you can find many other distributions for various prices including free.
Listing all the possible distributions would have been overkill. I listed an example of the distributions for comparison. Should I include other operating systems too? What then about Solaris x86, OS X, etc...?
I realize that you can get MS Win32 systems for a little less, but you can also get Linux for free from many of the distributions. The point is that the recommended prices show MS Win32 generally higher. You also need to consider that these are for a single seat license and if you add a server for MS Win32 systems that you need to have CAL's which can really start to add up. I know that the more commercial versions of Linux also have server pricing, but again, you can get some of these for free too.
As to PriceWatch showing prices, what your really seeing is a pass through to vendors that register with PriceWatch. Linux solutions tend to go through other channels, but I'd guess if you check some of the companies that post to PriceWatch, I'm sure you'd find that some offer Linux solutions, but haven't posted them.
Overall though, the price of the OS is a small part of the TCO when considering software. At the company I work at, they spend more money on the process to get software rather than the software itself in most cases. By the time that I would write the justification, get manager approval, purchasing reviews and puts out the request or a preferred vendor purchase order, the cost of an item is really insignificant. Maybe at a large volume, the unit price will take effect, but usually large organizations will negotiate very nice prices.
When you really get down to it, the major cost of a system is the ease of operation, integration, deployment, maintenance, and 3rd party vendor support. Hardware is usually not much of a factor unless your starting to look at very large systems. If your looking, for example, at blade servers, Dell, HP, Sun, IBM, etc... all run about the same price until you start scaling them up. Workstations, pretty much the same. Commercial software, again, competitive on the various platforms. You really need to look at the problem and use the best solution (wether UNIX or MS Win32 based).
Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition - Retail Price $199 (U.S.)
Microsoft Windows XP Professional - Retail Price $299 (U.S.)
RedHat WS Basic - Retail Price $179 (U.S.)
RedHat WS Standard - Retail Price $179 (U.S.)
Suse Personal - Retail Price $29 (U.S.)
Suse Professional - Retail Price $89 (U.S.) And you can find many other distributions for various prices including free.
Usability is really defined by what you intend to use the sytem for. As a common system, it is probably missing some of the functionality you would find on a MS Win32 system. For most of the common desktop functions, it has most of the features. Where Linuz is suffering is the massive vendor support that MS Win32 systems have. This will change as Linux gains acceptance (recall the days where applications only ran on UNIX systems and eventually vendors started to add MS Win32 support). Drivers also suffer a similar fate.
As for the administrator cost, the TCO is debatable. The company I work for pays basically the same rates for administrators on either platform. This also applies to any of my previous employers (although skills with MS Exchange and Active Directory seem to demand higher prices than the equivilent skilled workers on UNIX systems).
Mainly wanted to back up your post.
I agree that filters may not be the most effective tool, but they can be useful, particularly in preventing accidental viewing of some of the more extreme material on the web. The first example I can think of would be something like the whitehouse.com vs whitehouse.gov (I don't know if this is still a problem).
As far as the long term approach, if I'm trying to filter when they are in their mid-teens, likely I messed up when they were younger. In my opinion, a value system has been instilled at a much younger age. I'm sure that my kids will get a level of curiosity at some point but I don't want to expose them too early.
PS: Sorry for misinterpreting.
You missed the point entirely. The parent post I responded to seemed to indicate that installing a filter was side stepping parenting by putting the responsibility on software.
Perhaps you should offer drugs to your children, so that they can learn to resist?
Now why would you think of doing this? Did it work for you or your kids? Come on, nobody would do that. Kids need to be taught the dangers of drugs (and lots of other things), but offering them drugs isn't the approach I would use.
Kids don't need all the temptations of the Internet. Hell, I don't: I installed Dan's Guardian to filter my own browsing.
Kids using the Internet is almost a requirement in schools today. My kids (ages 7 & 10) have both had reports that asked for one Internet resource as part of their reports. Now that doesn't mean you give the kids unlimited access to the Internet because of the content. You could almost look at the Internet as going to the mall. For the most part, the stores are OK for kids to be in. You might want to "filter" them to not go into a "Spencer's", "Victoria Secret", etc... because you don't agree with the content (NOTE: I'm not saying these stores are necessarily bad, but as an example, their goods could be seen as "bad" for young children). Installing a filter for browsing can be useful to keep the "bad" information from showing up in your kids browser. I don't actually have a filter installed on my system but rather I do sit with my kids when they are doing anything in a browser. My kids do enjoy a few of the sites (Barbie, NeoPets, YuGiOh (sp?), Lego, Bionicles, etc...) and once at that site I might let them on their own for a bit. They know how to operate the browser and they also know that if they see anything that they weren't expecting that they are to get myself or my wife immediately. The sites they visit are what we consider acceptable material. Now my son has asked to look for things on Google and we as parents have told him that he can't use that unless we are sitting there with him. For now we trust him to follow our wishes and until he shows that he can't be trusted, we'll continue to give him some level of freedom (in this case we don't "block" him from doing things on the computer).
Or more realistically, take them shopping and then yell at them when they want you to buy them something?
Well telling them that you aren't buying them anything depends on why you went shopping in the first place. If you were going because you needed to pick up some groceries, then you can tell the kids that you aren't buying them anything. If you take them to the store and tell them that you are buying them something, then by all means you should hold to your word.
Back to the topic though, filtering is a tool that parents may choose to use to protect children from information they deem inappropriate. As for using a filter for your own browsing habits("I installed Dan's Guardian to filter my own browsing"), I guess you feel that you can't make a good decision or wish to rely on someone elses opinion (which may or may not match your own). You probably shouldn't allow your children Internet access as you don't seem to be able to protect yourself from the content. My approach is to prepare my kids to judge for themselves, within reason for the age/maturity.
Only if you agree that children don't acquire some rights to control their own reading habits at some point.
I think that if your installing a filter of some sort, you are controlling your kids reading habit. Parental involvement does not necessarily mean physically standing over their shoulders 24/7 though. You need to give children a degree of freedom while protecting them (what you protect them from is up to the individual parents). If you are filtering for your kids 24/7, they likely won't learn how to make decisions for themselves based on the values you have instilled into them. I'm not saying that you don't stay involved with kids but that you have to prepare them for that day when they go out on their own. I do agree that parental involvement is the best filter but it isn't the only way to protect and raise children.
That's how it actually turned out. In the end, the family of the deceased and the insurance company reached a settlement.
I understand how the process works, but from the common sense side, my father was ultimately responsible. Legally, yeah the company is liable, but I'm just thinking from a practical sense, which doesn't always follow legal sense.
Not sure from a family perspective that I see this (your anonymous post) as funny. In my fathers case, the doctors detected elevated enzymes (which I understand indicate a heart attack), but they were unable to determine exactly when they would have happened. Their findings were inconclusive as to wether it was a heard attack or possibly a seizure or some other condition.
Back to point though, the cause of the accident wasn't exactly what I would consider company related, but the lawyers see it that way.
Just to show how liability works...
My father is a plumber and was working for company X. Company X allowed him to use a company truck to take home (commute directly to jobs). One Saturday morning on his way to work, he had a medical problem (doctors were inconclusive if it was a heart attack, but they know something happened) that caused him to lose conciousness at the wheel. He went through a red light and killed a passenger in another vehicle. Now because he was in a company vehicle, the legal action was against company X rather than my father. Being that he was driving to a job site in the company vehicle, the company was liable. While financially I'm glad that my parents didn't have a direct cost to them (other than the legal side resulting in legal fees, probation, and court/probation cost), I don't believe it was really fair that the company bears the cost (insurance mostly, but still the rates are way up).
Being Orkut is acting as an agent of Google, unfortunately the company is liable. Logically though the blame should fall on the individual, but targeting the company and the individual seems to be the legal approach.
The device is rather expensive ($8K) and you'll need high-end graphics cards, but they produce nice results. A company produced a solution that used 4 Dell PCs, 3 of these panels (driven by 3 of the Dells), and one plasma screen (driven by 1 Dell and it combined the results of the 3 panels to show an overview) to create a cockpit for fly through scenes. Quite an impressive demo, but very expensive.
We also used a couple of these as the second head to a dual head workstation setup for geospatial demonstrations. Using it as a second display can be tricky, moving windows from screen to screen. Applications also seemed to perform slowly on that screen (video card wasn't quite ready for this level, but was the one recommended by IBM staff).
Personally, until these come down in price and graphics cards adequately handle all applications, I'll go for several panel displays (see this interesting one from Panoramtech for a "cockpit" like display).
I do shut my systems down when not in use. The boot/shutdown procedure isn't all the long and it does save on the electricity bill. As for adware/malware, I actively maintain the systems with current patches and security software and I keep the accounts to a minimum priviledge level (especially with the kids).
So how much could spam be reduced by people shutting down their PCs overnight/when they're at work?
While this could reduce the volume of SPAM, it is not necessarily the correct process for reduction. One should really correct their system so that it isn't acting as a "zombie". By ISPs disconnecting them and only reconnecting after the owner has repaired the system, the "zombie" SPAM should go away.
While I generally agree with this approach, one could also see where this would be abused. SPAM could be sent out advertising a company without the company being involved at all, just to get the company in trouble. An example:
Now likely the local bank would be able to prove that they haven't arranged for SPAM advertisement, but that doesn't help the bank from a consumer perspective.
I'm not against trying this, but the process is not without problems. I'm really hoping that the "zombie" systems are disconnected by ISPs to reduce the amount of spam mailing systems out there. If we can eliminate SPAMMERs ability to send anonymously, some of the anti-spam products will likely work better (mainly thinking of the list-based solutions).