I note that you completely ignored the parents' comments regarding reliability and feature set.
Myself, I'm not sure I'd have worded it quite the same way - rightly or wrongly I think the poster does come across as a bit of astroturf - but I work daily with Postgres and MySQL. I find that Postgres comes across as a better quality product - one which doesn't announce features until such time as they're pretty solid, whereas MySQL tends to follow the "release early, release often and don't worry if there's a bug which results in data loss, we'll worry about that in the next release" approach.
The thing that worries me is the bit about "if there's a bug which results in data loss...".
Zimbra is so good, I'm shocked it wasn't on his list. The one caveat is it's owned by Yahoo!, so if they either go away (doesn't seem likely) or do get bought out by Microsoft (also doesn't seem likely at this time), the support for it may disappear. But then, it's open source, it'll never really die, will it?
Ah. Funny you should say that.
I looked into Zimbra and actually, it's not as simple as that. It's licensed under a modified MPL, not GPL, with a very heavy trademark protection stance - you can't rebrand it, for one thing. It's a complicated enough project that I don't see there being a successful fork unless it's backed by a commercial enterprise and any commercial enterprise wanting to take it over would have to buy the rights to the Zimbra name.
We finally have a method of male contraception that doesn't involve surgery, abstinence, or a woman's permission! I'll take that laptop, son. I'm too old for more kids!
to the naughty (browsing websites outside the 'safety' filters),
Shouldn't be possible unless your filters were configured by a moron.
to the illegal (accessing private & sensitive student data)
Shouldn't be possible unless your servers were configured by a moron.
to the destructive (reformatting sections of the school network).
The word "formatting" doesn't make any sense here, unless some moron has set up a server in such a fashion as to allow disks to be remotely formatted.
Think - what if a student used advanced access to delete a whole year's coursework?
Not possible - not unless your network was configured by a moron.
Do you see the pattern here? There's no nice way of putting this, but if any of the scenarios you outline are possible then your network was set up by a moron.
(FWIW, I've worked in a school and seen this mindset quite a lot. 20 years ago school networks were often designed on the assumption that the client PC could be trusted but that hasn't been the case in a very long time).
I've worked in a school myself, but I was only there 1 year as part of a sandwich course.
Everything you've said is absolutely right and more besides - another thing that aggravated me was that so much educational software complete with site license comes with instructions that say "Insert the CD into the CD-ROM drive, click Start-Run and type D:\setup. For site licenses, do this with every computer you want to install it on." (This was some years ago, I don't know if things have improved since then).
A former colleague explained this to me, and I think it makes a lot of sense. Educational software tends to fall into one of two categories:
1. Written by IT people. Generally follows UI guidelines broadly in line with everything else, is easy to install across an entire site. There's only one small problem - it's absolutely lousy at getting ideas across.
2. Written by teachers who have a side interest in IT. Frequently has a UI which you'd pay good money to avoid, has an installation mechanism which seems to actively resist being automated across an entire network, assumes so many things about the computer that you wonder how come anyone's ever made it work. But when it is working, it teaches ideas pretty nicely.
And don't even get me started on companies that make a living not by producing good products but by sending a flyer to every school in the phone book announcing themselves to be "specialists in education".
Please remember that when they're trying to teach, teachers are basically control freaks.
I'm not saying this to be derogatory, you understand, but when you're trying to get a bunch of kids who don't necessarily want to sit still and pay attention to listen to you, what other option is there?
That explains the teachers' reaction to the student handing out Linux disks. It'd probably be much the same whatever the student was handing out.
Regarding their reaction to the existence of Linux - well, there's no shortage of narrow-minded people in teaching, as in any walk of life.
Likewise, the proxy server invisibility is entirely deliberate, to try and prevent people from determining which servers are being filtered. (It doesn't work, of course.) I think all of this is in the publicly-available and/or leaked design information.
I had figured out that it was likely to be a deliberate design decision - few proxy servers are misconfigured by default - but I didn't know that documentation proving this had been leaked. Got a citation for that?
And if you think it's okay, my personal moral evaluation is as follows: you can rot in hell along with the RIAA ghouls who do this sort of thing.
Well said that man. There's a lot of politically correct "I dare not say something for fear it will cause offence" in the world today, and sometimes you just need to stand up and say "You know what? You may be free to hold that opinion but I'm free to tell you I think your opinion is not only wrong, it's downright abhorrent".
It's amazing how resistant 'modern' medicine is to basic proven work flow improvements such as checklists, treatment guidelines.
It's not just modern medicine - this has been a problem since more-or-less forever. Go and look up a little medical history about the early use of antiseptics, anaesthetics and even such basic practices as good hygiene.
There was a documentary shown a few weeks ago in the UK about a 19th century doctor who noticed that births attended by doctors had a much higher fatality rate than those attended by midwives - he eventually figured out that hygiene had something to do with it and started making sure he and those working under him washed before visiting the maternity wards. His fatality rate plummeted but still the majority of doctors refused to change how they worked and he wound up literally driven insane because he had worked out how one could easily save thousands of lives but nobody was prepared to even give his idea a go.
Unfortunately I forget his name now so I can't easily find more information to point you at.
I'm willing to put up with the odd image being wrongly classified (especially if that classification can be reversed) if it avoids Government mandated censorship. Although we're probably already suffering that anyway:(
As am I - however I note that a number of ISPs have implemented it really badly. Their proxy server is invisible to both the client and the server - it doesn't send an HTTP header indication which IP it's proxying on behalf of - and in at least one case it doesn't actively inform the user of what it's doing, instead just dropping the connection.
"Because God created it, the human body can remain nude and uncovered and preserve intact its splendor and its beauty." - Pope John Paul II
Considering God's reaction to discovering that Adam and Eve had eaten from the tree of knowledge and had become embarrassed at being naked, I'd even argue that if we want to be closer to God we shouldn't be wearing anything anyway.
Virgin Media user - they just drop the connection so it looks like the website you're connecting to has some sort of problem.
Absolutely despicable - I'm less bothered about the censorship aspect than I am about the "breaking the Internet" aspect. If they're going to go dropping random connections because they don't like what may be transmitted in the packet, how on Earth am I meant to reliably troubleshoot any internet issues?
... only one in which you require an external drive of any kind.
Somebody else if not myself will show you why it is unnecessary and to be considered risky.
There's a huge difference between "require" and "would like".
In a large business, pretty much everyone's computer needs except possibly those at the very top are dealt with on a "require" basis. External drives certainly don't come under that category, and there's a lot to be said for disabling them.
In a smaller business (which, I would point out, are responsible for most of the jobs in the developed world), people don't tend to specialise so much and therefore setting up their computer to be extremely specialised in use is a very bad idea.
Well you see, the answer for that bug is "you need to reinstall", but people are getting more informed, and sees alternatives which doesn't need to be reinstalled that often, especially not for the reasons you need to reinstall windows.
Partly because it's starting to become obvious that "you need to reinstall" actually means "I haven't a damn clue so I'm going to recommend something that's not necessarily very practical in the hope that you'll hangup, say "sod that, we'll work around" and I'll never have to deal with the problem again."
Wow, this sounds fantastic! Instead of using Ubuntu with OpenOffice from the repos, and paying Canonical for support, or, say, being able to pay *ANYONE* for support, since I have the full source...
I can be locked into paying IBM for support for all the proprietary binaries! What a great idea!
...except not.
Free clue: People are moving away from Microsoft for a whole bunch of reasons.
"It's expensive" is a common one.
"We're being pressured into upgrades we don't want to make" is another.
"It's proprietary and only Micosoft can support it" is very rare indeed. Go look in the Yellow Pages and you'll find hundreds of companies prepared to support Windows. Obviously they're a bit stuck if you hit a problem that's caused by a bug which cannot easily be worked around, but these are seldom enough that it's not really a big problem.
Or the result could be an innocent person dragged through the courts possibly even convicted. Just because they had a criminal relative who made sure to have a good alibi.
Very true.
Even if you assume that the innocent person is ultimately found not guilty, there appears to be an assumption on the part of the justice system that no form of punishment takes place until conviction.
But our justice system doesn't gel with how society works. If I'm arrested and held until such time as I can be tried (which may be some months), what am I to tell my employer? Are they expected to hold my job open for me? If not, what am I to tell potential future employers? "The reason I left my last job and I've been unemployed for 9 months is because I was arrested, held in custody, tried and eventually found not guilty for a crime I never committed."
If I am bailed but the conditions of bail effectively prevent me from doing my job, what then? How about my mortgage or my rent? Am I to ask my landlord not to evict me or my mortgage company not to foreclose (even though I'm unable to earn money)? What about my possessions? If I am to be evicted or my house repossessed, what of them? Am I to have to buy everything all over again? How exactly do you replace 20 year old photographs which were disposed of by the landlord because he was successful in evicting me?
I haven't even started to consider personal relationships - that's an even bigger can of worms.
"We find the defendant innocent". Great. Thanks. Now can I have my job, loss of earnings, house, wife and children back please?
More specifically, there have been cases where person x is arrested. Their dna matches closely a crime. They are able to demonstrate a good alibi, so the police then find and convict a relative who had never been arrested or had DNA taken.
Problem is, in cases like the one you describe, if they can't demonstrate a good alibi there's precious little incentive for the police to investigate further even if they have got the wrong man and they really want his brother. DNA evidence is largely perceived as being foolproof.
For some reason these never really caught on on the PC but they were commonly used for game soundtracks in the early 1990's on many other platforms because while they store the notes and tempo (like a MIDI file), they can also store samples, guaranteeing what the track will sound like regardless of what system's playing it.
You're completely wrong, there. There's no way that suing someone with high-priced lawyers is anything like breaking your legs and burning your business down.
OK, these lawyers can drain your time and cash like nothing else on Earth.
OK, even if you have a sympathetic judge who disagrees with the RIAA they can and will drag the process out until they get a judge who's more sympathetic to them.
OK, the legal system is so complicated that if you don't have the money to hire your own lawyers, the immense likelihood is that you'll lose very quickly and painfully.
OK, so if you do lose, they can and will get damages awarded which are obscenely out of proportion. And if you don't pay those damages, they can send the debt collectors in.
OK, most debt collectors aren't exactly well known for being kind sweet thoughtful people - and while they probably won't actually break your legs, they'll certainly intimidate you enough to think "but what if they do...?"
...one of the people that got arrested and released does a crime against you or your family. Then the breach of rights complaint that the person made mysteriously disappears.
Breach of rights? What rights? The right to NOT have your DNA stored in a government database if you were to get arrested for committing a crime?
Stop right there. As far as the law is concerned, the person who's accused of committing a crime against you may or may not have done so. It is up to the justice system to decide whether or not they did, and once that decision is reached, if the answer is "not guilty" (or, for that matter, "we aren't pressing charges"), they are entitled to receive exactly the same treatment by any member of society (or indeed society itself) as if the suspicion had never occurred.
That's the whole point of "innocent until proven guilty", it's been the whole point of British justice for centuries.
What you're effectively advocating is that a person who has ever been arrested for any reason, should be automatically considered "more likely a criminal" than the rest of the general public - even though the police may have kept them for no more than a couple of hours before realising they'd made a mistake and releasing them without charge.
The only fair way to deal with that - and, what I suspect, the home office may well advocate if they think they can get away with it - is to take DNA samples from the entire population.
Slashdot Mirror
I note that you completely ignored the parents' comments regarding reliability and feature set.
Myself, I'm not sure I'd have worded it quite the same way - rightly or wrongly I think the poster does come across as a bit of astroturf - but I work daily with Postgres and MySQL. I find that Postgres comes across as a better quality product - one which doesn't announce features until such time as they're pretty solid, whereas MySQL tends to follow the "release early, release often and don't worry if there's a bug which results in data loss, we'll worry about that in the next release" approach.
The thing that worries me is the bit about "if there's a bug which results in data loss...".
Zimbra is so good, I'm shocked it wasn't on his list. The one caveat is it's owned by Yahoo!, so if they either go away (doesn't seem likely) or do get bought out by Microsoft (also doesn't seem likely at this time), the support for it may disappear. But then, it's open source, it'll never really die, will it?
Ah. Funny you should say that.
I looked into Zimbra and actually, it's not as simple as that. It's licensed under a modified MPL, not GPL, with a very heavy trademark protection stance - you can't rebrand it, for one thing. It's a complicated enough project that I don't see there being a successful fork unless it's backed by a commercial enterprise and any commercial enterprise wanting to take it over would have to buy the rights to the Zimbra name.
We finally have a method of male contraception that doesn't involve surgery, abstinence, or a woman's permission! I'll take that laptop, son. I'm too old for more kids!
We already had one, it's called slashdot.
to the naughty (browsing websites outside the 'safety' filters),
Shouldn't be possible unless your filters were configured by a moron.
to the illegal (accessing private & sensitive student data)
Shouldn't be possible unless your servers were configured by a moron.
to the destructive (reformatting sections of the school network).
The word "formatting" doesn't make any sense here, unless some moron has set up a server in such a fashion as to allow disks to be remotely formatted.
Think - what if a student used advanced access to delete a whole year's coursework?
Not possible - not unless your network was configured by a moron.
Do you see the pattern here? There's no nice way of putting this, but if any of the scenarios you outline are possible then your network was set up by a moron.
(FWIW, I've worked in a school and seen this mindset quite a lot. 20 years ago school networks were often designed on the assumption that the client PC could be trusted but that hasn't been the case in a very long time).
I've worked in a school myself, but I was only there 1 year as part of a sandwich course.
Everything you've said is absolutely right and more besides - another thing that aggravated me was that so much educational software complete with site license comes with instructions that say "Insert the CD into the CD-ROM drive, click Start-Run and type D:\setup. For site licenses, do this with every computer you want to install it on." (This was some years ago, I don't know if things have improved since then).
A former colleague explained this to me, and I think it makes a lot of sense. Educational software tends to fall into one of two categories:
1. Written by IT people. Generally follows UI guidelines broadly in line with everything else, is easy to install across an entire site. There's only one small problem - it's absolutely lousy at getting ideas across.
2. Written by teachers who have a side interest in IT. Frequently has a UI which you'd pay good money to avoid, has an installation mechanism which seems to actively resist being automated across an entire network, assumes so many things about the computer that you wonder how come anyone's ever made it work. But when it is working, it teaches ideas pretty nicely.
And don't even get me started on companies that make a living not by producing good products but by sending a flyer to every school in the phone book announcing themselves to be "specialists in education".
It's still control freak, it's just using a different method to the authoritarian one.
Please remember that when they're trying to teach, teachers are basically control freaks.
I'm not saying this to be derogatory, you understand, but when you're trying to get a bunch of kids who don't necessarily want to sit still and pay attention to listen to you, what other option is there?
That explains the teachers' reaction to the student handing out Linux disks. It'd probably be much the same whatever the student was handing out.
Regarding their reaction to the existence of Linux - well, there's no shortage of narrow-minded people in teaching, as in any walk of life.
You don't want to receive it.
You have no obligation to respond to it.
The sender had no obligation to send it.
That fairly accurately describes about 60-70% of business email.
Likewise, the proxy server invisibility is entirely deliberate, to try and prevent people from determining which servers are being filtered. (It doesn't work, of course.) I think all of this is in the publicly-available and/or leaked design information.
I had figured out that it was likely to be a deliberate design decision - few proxy servers are misconfigured by default - but I didn't know that documentation proving this had been leaked. Got a citation for that?
Probably Semmelweis.
Yep, that's the one. Thanks.
And if you think it's okay, my personal moral evaluation is as follows: you can rot in hell along with the RIAA ghouls who do this sort of thing.
Well said that man. There's a lot of politically correct "I dare not say something for fear it will cause offence" in the world today, and sometimes you just need to stand up and say "You know what? You may be free to hold that opinion but I'm free to tell you I think your opinion is not only wrong, it's downright abhorrent".
It's amazing how resistant 'modern' medicine is to basic proven work flow improvements such as checklists, treatment guidelines.
It's not just modern medicine - this has been a problem since more-or-less forever. Go and look up a little medical history about the early use of antiseptics, anaesthetics and even such basic practices as good hygiene.
There was a documentary shown a few weeks ago in the UK about a 19th century doctor who noticed that births attended by doctors had a much higher fatality rate than those attended by midwives - he eventually figured out that hygiene had something to do with it and started making sure he and those working under him washed before visiting the maternity wards. His fatality rate plummeted but still the majority of doctors refused to change how they worked and he wound up literally driven insane because he had worked out how one could easily save thousands of lives but nobody was prepared to even give his idea a go.
Unfortunately I forget his name now so I can't easily find more information to point you at.
I'm willing to put up with the odd image being wrongly classified (especially if that classification can be reversed) if it avoids Government mandated censorship. Although we're probably already suffering that anyway :(
As am I - however I note that a number of ISPs have implemented it really badly. Their proxy server is invisible to both the client and the server - it doesn't send an HTTP header indication which IP it's proxying on behalf of - and in at least one case it doesn't actively inform the user of what it's doing, instead just dropping the connection.
"Because God created it, the human body can remain nude and uncovered and preserve intact its splendor and its beauty." - Pope John Paul II
Considering God's reaction to discovering that Adam and Eve had eaten from the tree of knowledge and had become embarrassed at being naked, I'd even argue that if we want to be closer to God we shouldn't be wearing anything anyway.
Virgin Media user - they just drop the connection so it looks like the website you're connecting to has some sort of problem.
Absolutely despicable - I'm less bothered about the censorship aspect than I am about the "breaking the Internet" aspect. If they're going to go dropping random connections because they don't like what may be transmitted in the packet, how on Earth am I meant to reliably troubleshoot any internet issues?
... only one in which you require an external drive of any kind.
Somebody else if not myself will show you why it is unnecessary and to be considered risky.
There's a huge difference between "require" and "would like".
In a large business, pretty much everyone's computer needs except possibly those at the very top are dealt with on a "require" basis. External drives certainly don't come under that category, and there's a lot to be said for disabling them.
In a smaller business (which, I would point out, are responsible for most of the jobs in the developed world), people don't tend to specialise so much and therefore setting up their computer to be extremely specialised in use is a very bad idea.
Well you see, the answer for that bug is "you need to reinstall", but people are getting more informed, and sees alternatives which doesn't need to be reinstalled that often, especially not for the reasons you need to reinstall windows.
Partly because it's starting to become obvious that "you need to reinstall" actually means "I haven't a damn clue so I'm going to recommend something that's not necessarily very practical in the hope that you'll hangup, say "sod that, we'll work around" and I'll never have to deal with the problem again."
They're called Roaming Profiles.
(ducks)
No, there's so much more. There's no CD drive, no USB drive, no external drive of any sort.
Might work in a call centre but in many other parts of business, one size doesn't fit all.
Wow, this sounds fantastic! Instead of using Ubuntu with OpenOffice from the repos, and paying Canonical for support, or, say, being able to pay *ANYONE* for support, since I have the full source...
I can be locked into paying IBM for support for all the proprietary binaries! What a great idea!
...except not.
Free clue: People are moving away from Microsoft for a whole bunch of reasons.
"It's expensive" is a common one.
"We're being pressured into upgrades we don't want to make" is another.
"It's proprietary and only Micosoft can support it" is very rare indeed. Go look in the Yellow Pages and you'll find hundreds of companies prepared to support Windows. Obviously they're a bit stuck if you hit a problem that's caused by a bug which cannot easily be worked around, but these are seldom enough that it's not really a big problem.
Or the result could be an innocent person dragged through the courts possibly even convicted. Just because they had a criminal relative who made sure to have a good alibi.
Very true.
Even if you assume that the innocent person is ultimately found not guilty, there appears to be an assumption on the part of the justice system that no form of punishment takes place until conviction.
But our justice system doesn't gel with how society works. If I'm arrested and held until such time as I can be tried (which may be some months), what am I to tell my employer? Are they expected to hold my job open for me? If not, what am I to tell potential future employers? "The reason I left my last job and I've been unemployed for 9 months is because I was arrested, held in custody, tried and eventually found not guilty for a crime I never committed."
If I am bailed but the conditions of bail effectively prevent me from doing my job, what then? How about my mortgage or my rent? Am I to ask my landlord not to evict me or my mortgage company not to foreclose (even though I'm unable to earn money)? What about my possessions? If I am to be evicted or my house repossessed, what of them? Am I to have to buy everything all over again? How exactly do you replace 20 year old photographs which were disposed of by the landlord because he was successful in evicting me?
I haven't even started to consider personal relationships - that's an even bigger can of worms.
"We find the defendant innocent". Great. Thanks. Now can I have my job, loss of earnings, house, wife and children back please?
More specifically, there have been cases where person x is arrested. Their dna matches closely a crime. They are able to demonstrate a good alibi, so the police then find and convict a relative who had never been arrested or had DNA taken.
Problem is, in cases like the one you describe, if they can't demonstrate a good alibi there's precious little incentive for the police to investigate further even if they have got the wrong man and they really want his brother. DNA evidence is largely perceived as being foolproof.
How would they do it other than MIDI? Don't forget they have 50 instruments in addition to the 50 songs.
Well, the obvious solution that I can think of would be something like a tracker MOD file. (see also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trackers)
For some reason these never really caught on on the PC but they were commonly used for game soundtracks in the early 1990's on many other platforms because while they store the notes and tempo (like a MIDI file), they can also store samples, guaranteeing what the track will sound like regardless of what system's playing it.
You're completely wrong, there. There's no way that suing someone with high-priced lawyers is anything like breaking your legs and burning your business down.
OK, these lawyers can drain your time and cash like nothing else on Earth.
OK, even if you have a sympathetic judge who disagrees with the RIAA they can and will drag the process out until they get a judge who's more sympathetic to them.
OK, the legal system is so complicated that if you don't have the money to hire your own lawyers, the immense likelihood is that you'll lose very quickly and painfully.
OK, so if you do lose, they can and will get damages awarded which are obscenely out of proportion. And if you don't pay those damages, they can send the debt collectors in.
OK, most debt collectors aren't exactly well known for being kind sweet thoughtful people - and while they probably won't actually break your legs, they'll certainly intimidate you enough to think "but what if they do...?"
OK, the RIAA are fully aware of all this.
But it's nothing like mob protection!
...one of the people that got arrested and released does a crime against you or your family. Then the breach of rights complaint that the person made mysteriously disappears.
Breach of rights? What rights? The right to NOT have your DNA stored in a government database if you were to get arrested for committing a crime?
Stop right there. As far as the law is concerned, the person who's accused of committing a crime against you may or may not have done so. It is up to the justice system to decide whether or not they did, and once that decision is reached, if the answer is "not guilty" (or, for that matter, "we aren't pressing charges"), they are entitled to receive exactly the same treatment by any member of society (or indeed society itself) as if the suspicion had never occurred.
That's the whole point of "innocent until proven guilty", it's been the whole point of British justice for centuries.
What you're effectively advocating is that a person who has ever been arrested for any reason, should be automatically considered "more likely a criminal" than the rest of the general public - even though the police may have kept them for no more than a couple of hours before realising they'd made a mistake and releasing them without charge.
The only fair way to deal with that - and, what I suspect, the home office may well advocate if they think they can get away with it - is to take DNA samples from the entire population.