It is so ridiculous. There is no way taxpayer money should be used to purchase something as ridiculously overpriced as a bulk load of MacBooks (a few for school use, fine). This school board needs some serious management changes if they're greenlighting this sort of purchase when there are much cheaper options.
You are assuming that the price Apple are prepared to offer for a bulk order of laptops to a school is broadly the same as the price on Apple's website for a Macbook.
NFS does suck. It trusts the client to do quite a bit of access control enforcement insofar as it expects the UIDs to be the same on the client and the server.
Invent a mobile and low powered concentrator? You mean like the Invacare XPO2 at 6lbs and 5lpm flow rates, or the range of others available on the market?
Great idea. The only problem is that it's only good for 5 hours, and that's with the optional extra battery. Which probably hasn't been tested at such high altitudes so how well it'll work is anybody's guess.
This was Win95 and about 9 years ago, but on my K62-400, it generally crashed horribly towards the end of the boot process. Disabling L1 and L2 cache in the BIOS enabled it to boot fine - provided you didn't mind it being unusably slow;)
Win98 was fine.
I stand by my original point, though. Just because the hardware is in theory compatible all the way back to the original 8086 doesn't mean it's safe to assume that you can still install DOS and fire up your 20 year old application.
The biggest killer in my experience is seek time. Any modern OS could be jumping all over the disk for things like loading pages which have been swapped out, dynamic libraries and of course your data. You can put your data on a different physical disk to your OS and applications, which obviously will improve performance at the cost of flexibility.
Look up the sustained data transfer rates of 15Krpm SAS disks versus 7200RPM SATA disks. It's not actually drastically different - the real difference is in seek time.
This is where flash drives are a huge win - they don't have to seek.
It seems ridiculous to create a new format which replicates part of the functionality of one which already exists with an open spec and a large number of existing implementations. All this does it create extra hassle for developers who now end up being forced to support multiple formats.
This has been Microsoft's SOP since more-or-less their inception.
Earlier today I sent an e-mail to the Swedish Security Police (something akin of an investigative police concering itself with e.g. terrorism) asking its head judicial if they have completely lost their mind. Haven't received an answer yet.
IME, police forces tend to want more powers. The correct question when formulating such policy should not be "how does this help our police forces?", it should be "how does this help the man in the street?"
The whole point of the GP post is there may not be.
If, in the next 5 years, some alternate format offering real benefits came to be and was widely implemented in digital cameras and other devices that use JPEG, it's likely that as a proportion of the number of images stored, usage of JPEG drops. Sooner or later it'll drop so low that it's not worth maintaining the code to read them - and even if it does get maintained, who knows if bugs have been introduced that can't easily be tested for because not enough people have a large archive of JPEGs to test against.
(To be fair, JPEG's a bit of an extreme example, but I'd be happy to bet against Word.doc files being easy to read in 20 years time).
You can definitely do that today with DOS and Windows 3.1 on todays hardware. If we move away from x86 architecture, then everything is out the window, but for now, yes, we can install OS from many years ago on todays hardware.
Tried that lately? Not sure about DOS and Win3.1, but certainly Win95 had a boatload of timing issues on newer hardware.
Not to defend these people but data storage systems are seldom sold with the caveat "look out, these things don't last forever, make sure you've got a plan B". You'd be amazed how many people outside of IT simply don't consider backup to be important.
And even if a salesman did make that clear to the DA's office, I wonder how long it would be before a less than honest salesman made out that his product didn't have that issue (even though it's exactly the same technology) and took the contract?
There's no such thing as media that is near failure proof. That's one of the great benefits of digital media - you can make identical backups before it fails.
Now, why the Santa Cruz DA's office doesn't have some sort of process to keep backups of data and migrate it onto newer media as technology progresses while still retaining proof that it's identical to what was originally recorded (so as to make sure it will stand in a court of law) is another issue altogether - and probably one worth considering seeing as data recovery firms charge an arm and a leg.
First of all, I wonder if "HP recommends Windows Vista® Business" (c/p from the product's description on HP's site) will go away when Linux offering is finally presented.
I doubt it. Have you noticed that the wording of that phrase is the same with every PC manufacturer? "${MANUFACTURER} recommends Windows ${VERSION}". It's a marketing thing from Microsoft - include this phrase prominently and get a % discount on your OEM licenses.
Actually it's quite plausible that tech staff isn't allowed to do this. Maybe the district has a contract with Microsoft, or the school regulations prohibit changing a standard district-wide setup.
Don't know about the US, nor do I know whether things have changed in the UK in the last 6 or 7 years. But the last time I looked at a standard Microsoft Education contract, it was quite clear. In order to count up how many licenses you need, you must count the number of computers physically capable of running their products. Not the number of computers you intend to run their products on.
It didn't actually say "and once you've bought the licenses you're not allowed to install Linux anyway", but it meant that selling the concept of Linux was suddenly much harder.
Buy volume licenses of Windows Vista. You will have downgrade rights to legally put WindowsXP on machines that need it.
That's all well and good if you're doing this entirely within an organisation, but reading between the lines of the parent, it looks like he's a consultant of some sort putting together systems for many small businesses. And Microsoft don't provide volume licenses for Windows in a fashion compatible with that.
This is honestly insightful, because the more they work on it, the more it will suffer from the heavy weight of feature creep. I hope their claim of 'modular' is still in the plans.
Of course it will. How else do you think they'll produce the 15 or 20 different versions of Windows 7?
if they are looking for a litmus test to identify technology suspect of housing illegal information, just having encrypted files or an encryption application may entice them to detain you / your technology. a "red flag" kind of thing. not saying i agree, but "if you have nothing to hide.." might be their logic.
Not only "might be" their logic, it almost certainly is.
Years ago, there was an automatic right to silence in the police station. Technically there still is, but today they're allowed to use your silence against you in court - as in "You never mentioned any of this while we were questioning you, does that sound like the action of an innocent man wanting to get everything over as quickly as possible? Or the action of a man waiting to concoct a lie at his leisure?"
Her day job is architect of the UK's Police Central E-crime Unit, so it might be a bit late for that.
Having said that, I get the distinct impression from RTFA that this is pie-in-the-sky "this is the sort of tool we'd like in an ideal world, not that it's even remotely practical" rather than something that's in active development:
said frontline police ideally need a digital forensic tool as easy to use as the breathalyser, to help them deal with growing numbers of computers being seized during raids on suspects' homes
Yep, and I bet they'd like a machine which they can just turn on, punch in details of an unsolved crime and bingo! it tells you the perpetrators name, address, telephone number, the car they drive, their plans for the next 48 hours and where sufficient evidence to obtain a conviction can be found. It's fairly obvious from the article that whatever qualification this woman has, none of them involve technology.
Seems to me this would bring up all problems about probable cause. Just because there is a computer doesn't necessarily mean it's been used for anything illegal, and can't be investigated because of that. It's kind of like, if the cops have a warrant to search for marijuana, and they find a gun, they can't take the gun in as evidence and run it and find that it's the murder weapon in something unrelated. Their warrant is for the marijuana, and just because they find a gun doesn't mean it's anything sinister.
Had you read the first word in the headline ("UK"), and had you a single iota of knowledge about the UK, you'd know that handguns are illegal and other guns are meant to be kept in a locked cabinet when not in use.
In which case, finding a gun almost certainly is evidence of something sinister.
So as long as you maintain the trademarks and logos as required, you're otherwise free to use the software as you choose. Should Yahoo! stop publishing Zimbra, there's nothing saying you couldn't keep using it and even keep developing it, as long as you don't change the name or trademarks associated with it. Yes, that means you can't fork it to become Ximbra (for example),
It also means that you can't fork it under the same name unless you happen to own the rights to the name "Zimbra". The GPL uses copyright law to its advantage, the ZPL uses trademark law.
My fear is someone like Microsoft buying the rights to the name Zimbra in order to kill the product.
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I can't imagine your average submarine has a leased line with unfiltered Internet access.
It is so ridiculous. There is no way taxpayer money should be used to purchase something as ridiculously overpriced as a bulk load of MacBooks (a few for school use, fine). This school board needs some serious management changes if they're greenlighting this sort of purchase when there are much cheaper options.
You are assuming that the price Apple are prepared to offer for a bulk order of laptops to a school is broadly the same as the price on Apple's website for a Macbook.
It's only anecdotal, I know, but I've heard similar stories.
While DBMSs may be the backend for the transactions themselves, a lot of the decisions for what transactions to make are based on spreadsheets.
NFS does suck. It trusts the client to do quite a bit of access control enforcement insofar as it expects the UIDs to be the same on the client and the server.
Invent a mobile and low powered concentrator? You mean like the Invacare XPO2 at 6lbs and 5lpm flow rates, or the range of others available on the market?
Great idea. The only problem is that it's only good for 5 hours, and that's with the optional extra battery. Which probably hasn't been tested at such high altitudes so how well it'll work is anybody's guess.
This was Win95 and about 9 years ago, but on my K62-400, it generally crashed horribly towards the end of the boot process. Disabling L1 and L2 cache in the BIOS enabled it to boot fine - provided you didn't mind it being unusably slow ;)
Win98 was fine.
I stand by my original point, though. Just because the hardware is in theory compatible all the way back to the original 8086 doesn't mean it's safe to assume that you can still install DOS and fire up your 20 year old application.
The biggest killer in my experience is seek time. Any modern OS could be jumping all over the disk for things like loading pages which have been swapped out, dynamic libraries and of course your data. You can put your data on a different physical disk to your OS and applications, which obviously will improve performance at the cost of flexibility.
Look up the sustained data transfer rates of 15Krpm SAS disks versus 7200RPM SATA disks. It's not actually drastically different - the real difference is in seek time.
This is where flash drives are a huge win - they don't have to seek.
It seems ridiculous to create a new format which replicates part of the functionality of one which already exists with an open spec and a large number of existing implementations. All this does it create extra hassle for developers who now end up being forced to support multiple formats.
This has been Microsoft's SOP since more-or-less their inception.
There was a timing issue which caused exactly that on anything faster than about 350MHz.
A patch was released for it but personally, I found it wasn't very reliable and you were better off installing Win98.
I have had some success running Win98 under virtualisation on modern hardware.
Earlier today I sent an e-mail to the Swedish Security Police (something akin of an investigative police concering itself with e.g. terrorism) asking its head judicial if they have completely lost their mind. Haven't received an answer yet.
IME, police forces tend to want more powers. The correct question when formulating such policy should not be "how does this help our police forces?", it should be "how does this help the man in the street?"
Because God knows both Cliff and Paul could do with all the income they can get in their autumn years.
The whole point of the GP post is there may not be.
If, in the next 5 years, some alternate format offering real benefits came to be and was widely implemented in digital cameras and other devices that use JPEG, it's likely that as a proportion of the number of images stored, usage of JPEG drops. Sooner or later it'll drop so low that it's not worth maintaining the code to read them - and even if it does get maintained, who knows if bugs have been introduced that can't easily be tested for because not enough people have a large archive of JPEGs to test against.
(To be fair, JPEG's a bit of an extreme example, but I'd be happy to bet against Word .doc files being easy to read in 20 years time).
You can definitely do that today with DOS and Windows 3.1 on todays hardware. If we move away from x86 architecture, then everything is out the window, but for now, yes, we can install OS from many years ago on todays hardware.
Tried that lately? Not sure about DOS and Win3.1, but certainly Win95 had a boatload of timing issues on newer hardware.
Not to defend these people but data storage systems are seldom sold with the caveat "look out, these things don't last forever, make sure you've got a plan B". You'd be amazed how many people outside of IT simply don't consider backup to be important.
And even if a salesman did make that clear to the DA's office, I wonder how long it would be before a less than honest salesman made out that his product didn't have that issue (even though it's exactly the same technology) and took the contract?
There's no such thing as media that is near failure proof. That's one of the great benefits of digital media - you can make identical backups before it fails.
Now, why the Santa Cruz DA's office doesn't have some sort of process to keep backups of data and migrate it onto newer media as technology progresses while still retaining proof that it's identical to what was originally recorded (so as to make sure it will stand in a court of law) is another issue altogether - and probably one worth considering seeing as data recovery firms charge an arm and a leg.
First of all, I wonder if "HP recommends Windows Vista® Business" (c/p from the product's description on HP's site) will go away when Linux offering is finally presented.
I doubt it. Have you noticed that the wording of that phrase is the same with every PC manufacturer? "${MANUFACTURER} recommends Windows ${VERSION}". It's a marketing thing from Microsoft - include this phrase prominently and get a % discount on your OEM licenses.
Actually it's quite plausible that tech staff isn't allowed to do this. Maybe the district has a contract with Microsoft, or the school regulations prohibit changing a standard district-wide setup.
Don't know about the US, nor do I know whether things have changed in the UK in the last 6 or 7 years. But the last time I looked at a standard Microsoft Education contract, it was quite clear. In order to count up how many licenses you need, you must count the number of computers physically capable of running their products. Not the number of computers you intend to run their products on.
It didn't actually say "and once you've bought the licenses you're not allowed to install Linux anyway", but it meant that selling the concept of Linux was suddenly much harder.
Because technology is a tool. And you can't turn a lousy teacher into a good one just by giving them better tools.
Buy volume licenses of Windows Vista. You will have downgrade rights to legally put WindowsXP on machines that need it.
That's all well and good if you're doing this entirely within an organisation, but reading between the lines of the parent, it looks like he's a consultant of some sort putting together systems for many small businesses. And Microsoft don't provide volume licenses for Windows in a fashion compatible with that.
This is honestly insightful, because the more they work on it, the more it will suffer from the heavy weight of feature creep. I hope their claim of 'modular' is still in the plans.
Of course it will. How else do you think they'll produce the 15 or 20 different versions of Windows 7?
Hear hear! I'm so sick of the incessant and ludicrous attempts to defend that nonsense.
So what you're saying is it's perfectly reasonable to serve coffee so hot it can give you third degree burns?
if they are looking for a litmus test to identify technology suspect of housing illegal information, just having encrypted files or an encryption application may entice them to detain you / your technology. a "red flag" kind of thing. not saying i agree, but "if you have nothing to hide.." might be their logic.
Not only "might be" their logic, it almost certainly is.
Years ago, there was an automatic right to silence in the police station. Technically there still is, but today they're allowed to use your silence against you in court - as in "You never mentioned any of this while we were questioning you, does that sound like the action of an innocent man wanting to get everything over as quickly as possible? Or the action of a man waiting to concoct a lie at his leisure?"
Her day job is architect of the UK's Police Central E-crime Unit, so it might be a bit late for that.
Having said that, I get the distinct impression from RTFA that this is pie-in-the-sky "this is the sort of tool we'd like in an ideal world, not that it's even remotely practical" rather than something that's in active development:
said frontline police ideally need a digital forensic tool as easy to use as the breathalyser, to help them deal with growing numbers of computers being seized during raids on suspects' homes
Yep, and I bet they'd like a machine which they can just turn on, punch in details of an unsolved crime and bingo! it tells you the perpetrators name, address, telephone number, the car they drive, their plans for the next 48 hours and where sufficient evidence to obtain a conviction can be found. It's fairly obvious from the article that whatever qualification this woman has, none of them involve technology.
Seems to me this would bring up all problems about probable cause. Just because there is a computer doesn't necessarily mean it's been used for anything illegal, and can't be investigated because of that. It's kind of like, if the cops have a warrant to search for marijuana, and they find a gun, they can't take the gun in as evidence and run it and find that it's the murder weapon in something unrelated. Their warrant is for the marijuana, and just because they find a gun doesn't mean it's anything sinister.
Had you read the first word in the headline ("UK"), and had you a single iota of knowledge about the UK, you'd know that handguns are illegal and other guns are meant to be kept in a locked cabinet when not in use.
In which case, finding a gun almost certainly is evidence of something sinister.
So as long as you maintain the trademarks and logos as required, you're otherwise free to use the software as you choose. Should Yahoo! stop publishing Zimbra, there's nothing saying you couldn't keep using it and even keep developing it, as long as you don't change the name or trademarks associated with it. Yes, that means you can't fork it to become Ximbra (for example),
It also means that you can't fork it under the same name unless you happen to own the rights to the name "Zimbra". The GPL uses copyright law to its advantage, the ZPL uses trademark law.
My fear is someone like Microsoft buying the rights to the name Zimbra in order to kill the product.