Facebook probably has a valid complaint. If you follow the links all the way to the author's page, you will note that he calls it "Fluff Busting Purity, also known as F*** B*** Purity" and he continues to use the F*** B*** and F.B. terms throughout. It's pretty obviously just a smack in their "face." If he wants to avoid lawsuits, he should just name it "mysocialnetwork purity" or something completely unrelated to FB. Then they could do nothing about it.
Email traffic volumes get pretty high. Even if you have local single-instance storage, remote systems aren't smart enough to take advantage of that. For example, an on-campus user sends a 50MB video to a list...
This seems like a specious example; are there any list servers that are configured to allow 50MB attachments?
Yes. A number of them.
But more to the point, by moving email off-campus, the university's external link now has to carry what was formerly more contained within the faster local network. This will have some cost, either in paying for increased capacity or in suffering diminished connectivity.
Correct. That also calculates into this, on the opposite side of the points I was making - I was not arguing to off-net the email, only pointing out some of the reasoning used.
Backups require additional storage, tape or disk. Tape is sluggish, and a full system backup of a large mail server takes a lot of time. Brick level backups are worse. Restoring individuals' accidentally deleted emails is often time consuming, since they seldom can actually tell you the subject line of the message you're trying to restore for them, into their too-full mailbox.
Again, this seems specious. Does Google restore accidentally-deleted emails for users?
Your point is fallacious. While Google won't bother to offer the user that sort of service, system administrators of locally-owned email services at colleges/universities often don't have the ability to turn said requests/demands down. So my point is hardly specious, it's a definite support issue for some college IT staff in that they have to help users undelete things they shouldnt' have deleted.
Most campus mail systems are commercial applications, such as MS Exchange. They are costly, and the license fees for running them are often more costly and grow faster than your storage. Open source is a great alternative, but some administrations aren't too accepting of anything that they can't buy, for various reasons.
Are there serious universities that run student email on Exchange? I admit I haven't been everywhere, but I've sure never seen that.
Many colleges (not just universities) run Exchange. I'm not sure how you differentiate between serious and non-serious institutions. I know of colleges with only their staff/faculty accounts in Exchange, and others with student accounts in excess of 40,000, running Exchange. I also know of institutions where each department runs their own system, and Exchange pops up in some of the departments.
If you google "Microsoft Exchange college" or "Microsoft Exchange university" you will get thousands of links to higher education bodies running Exchange for at least some of their population. For example: Texas Christian University, Edinburgh Napier University, University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (45,000 employees), University of Kentucky, University of Sydney, University of Arkansas, Colorado State University, University of Connecticut, University of Miami Leonard M. Miller School of Medicine, Eastern Illinois University, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (if that's not a serious university in your definition, then there is no such thing), Pace University, University of South Carolina, University of Washington, California State University at Northridge, University of Virginia, University of New Orleans, University of Pittsburgh, Tufts University, and many many more. And I haven't even started pasting in "college" names (versus "university").
There are a number of good reasons for *not* hosting your own email.
User issues are constant. And that's not just the students, it's faculty and staff, too.
Increasing demands for storage drive up costs. As soon as you expand a user's storage space, s/he fills it up and asks for more. Automatic archival systems help, but are also expensive.
Email traffic volumes get pretty high. Even if you have local single-instance storage, remote systems aren't smart enough to take advantage of that. For example, an on-campus user sends a 50MB video to a list server at a remote site, rather than sending a link to the video. The remote list server has 30 other subscribers on the same campus. Back comes the same video, in 30 separate emails, through the shared and often already heavily loaded campus Internet trunk(s), to the local email system. Storage jumped from 30Mb in the first user's "sent" store to 1.5GB across multiple inbox stores.
Record retention may require backups to be kept for years, depending on state and local statutes and regulations.
Most campus mail systems are commercial applications, such as MS Exchange. They are costly, and the license fees for running them are often more costly and grow faster than your storage. Open source is a great alternative, but some administrations aren't too accepting of anything that they can't buy, for various reasons.
Backups require additional storage, tape or disk. Tape is sluggish, and a full system backup of a large mail server takes a lot of time. Brick level backups are worse. Restoring individuals' accidentally deleted emails is often time consuming, since they seldom can actually tell you the subject line of the message you're trying to restore for them, into their too-full mailbox. Disk backup is faster, but far more costly than tape.
Power and cooling overhead increase with storage, and energy isn't cheap.
Downtime is a huge issue. Everyone wants 24x7, 5 9's service, if not better. That means backups are done online, which slows them down more. Incrementals and synthetics become bigger issues for possible emergency restoration plans.
Email is a huge issue in disaster recovery, and email restoration is usually a top priority for any sort of disaster, as communications are critical during emergencies. It's time-consuming to build a fresh server farm for email, restore data, and return to "normal" email services.
E-discovery is a costly endeavor every time it has to be done. One lawsuit or complaint can result in hundreds of man hours lost to sifting through email stores, archives, backups, and logs.
Uninterrupted power means UPS and generator requirements.
Data Centers are expensive real estate, and all many other information and technology systems are also putting increasing burdens on them.
Costs continue to increase, yet funding is decreasing in most institutions. Students don't want their tuition/fees increased. Taxpayers don't want tax increases. Yet service demands continue to grow.
None of this precludes the fact that there are compliance and privacy issues surrounding email. FERPA, HIPPA, GLB, SOX, and Privacy Act may all apply. It's not an easy decision. There are at least as many factors supporting retained hosting. Outsourcing student email hosting can make a lot of sense. I don't recommend outsourcing faculty/staff email for an educational institution, but there are certainly a lot of reasons to consider it.
Microsoft has a history of repressing the competition and its customers, and even of buying out members of standards committees to grab / keep marketshare. As a company, Microsoft shows no real ethics. Why would it start now?
been around the world several times. found braindead everywhere. especially so in english-speaking countries. but maybe that's just because i understood what they were saying more than most.
Exactly wrong. You need to learn more about the situation. Work for hire rules do not apply in all situations, and especially when contracts exist. Teachers are paid to teach, and little more. Public school contracts stipulate ownership of developed material, and the norm is for the teachers to own their work. Otherwise, they'd get paid more. It's one way that schools avoid paying higher salaries.
Ice dams form, as in the link you provided, at the point where there is no heat, where the roof extends past the house exterior walls. This dome would be a very good example of a poorly insulated roof. The ice dam would thus form at ground level along the edge of the dome. Hence, my original comment about water runoff management (to prevent ice dams).
This would be a good deal larger dome than a sporting event dome, with active households and vehicles under it. There could be more heat trapped within it than a sports dome would trap. A sports dome has occasional occupation, versus the continuous occupation a city dome would have.
Plus, cities have politicians. This is a wonderful source of hot air.
keep in mind that the heat of the warm air rising in the dome would be sufficient to maintain it well above freezing. therefore, snow would not collect. there would have to be some allowances made in the design for water runoff during winter, which would cause some ice buildup around it from even light snows.
Worse than just a breach of privacy of email, students use their college-provided accounts to communicate with their faculty. If other students are able to see their emails, that constitutes a potential FERPA breach. As a college IT administrator, I would be screaming at Google for not sharing info and reacting immediately. Waiting a day to shut the accounts down temporarily is inexcusable.
1. A longer neural path between brain and vocal cords might force more time between thought and speech, although it's quite clear that many humans barely think before speaking.
2. Rerouting the nerve keeps it out of the way of the penis during fellatio.
3 years ago, Spamhaus was fined by a US federal court in Illinois. Of course, jurisdiction was the issue, and the US lost in the appeal. It was reported on here in slashdot. Makes the US no different from Belgium, except Belgian beer is better than ours. http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/09/05/1359232
No offence, but that's not insightful at all, that's just ignorant.
You must be new here. You will never get rated insightful if you conflict with a geek's opinion, regardless of the accuracy of your post. Also, you will always get a low score of 1 or 2. Conversely, geek whines are always rated insightful, 4 or 5 score.
In most of the country (at least in the US) you are rather limited on broadband access. There is typically a cable provider in the area, and many of them do not offer Internet access. There is typically a telephone provider that can provide you service, but even the big ones don't offer Internet access everywhere. [I live in a city-burb of Chicago, in a high-end neighborhood, and though I get dozens of leaflets from AT&T every year about cheaper, faster access, they don't offer it at my house. Go figure.] So most people in the US don't necessarily have a lot of choice.
The second piece of this is that if you want to always pay the cheapest rate, you're going to get shared, multiplexed service. If you want dedicated bandwidth, it's probably available to you. Just ask for business class service, which will give you a guaranteed rate. Of course, you're going to pay significantly different costs for guaranteed rates.
Finally, you have the option to complain as a customer to your provider, and to rally support with other consumers. Do it. Meanwhile, *everyone* knows that home Internet service is a multiplexed service, even if they don't know the term. It's like your subdivision street. Your provider will gradually increase bandwidth as the "street" gets busier. However, it makes little sense to invest $100,000 in a vault upgrade or add a $200/mo charge to their operation when 98% of a 100-home subdivision is barely using the bandwidth, and 1 or 2 users are constantly consuming all available bandwidth. They should pay for the upgrade. But they'd rather complain. The provider's obvious option is to shape them. Most of the time, that just means lowering priority for certain classes of traffic such as file sharing protocols (Gnutella, eDonkey, etc.) compared to interactive protocols such as http. Few bother to do rate limiting. Mostly, they just shape so that when the network is operating near capacity, the interactive stuff gets priority.
Meanwhile, no one else wants to bear the cost burden of increasing bandwidth just so Joey-down-the-block can share files with his buds across the planet. If my provider told me that they have to increase the costs in our area because Joey's complaining, I'd laugh and tell them to charge Joey.
Absolutely agreed. I'm 50, been CIO in two organizations, and an independent consultant. I keep my technical knowledge and my management skills polished all the time. I don't care about syntactic discussions in specific languages, but I do keep up to speed on infrastructure, convergence, systems hardening, security tools and techniques, risk management, and other areas. The political jungle is often the most challenging part. My age means nothing to the people I work for, except that it implies seasoned experience. My skill sets are everything. Just the way I want it.
And to top that off, the blogger's whole blog post was off-target. He completely ignores that fact that we've been in a recession, especially the news industry. How are they going to come up with the huge investment capital to move their systems over to clouds at a time like this? Basically, the blogger is a troll.
The most annoying part is that some of the carriers, such as US Cellular, disable some of the handset features so that you have to use their costly services to, for example, share a photo. US Cellular provides good service in their areas of coverage, but I had phones from them over a number of years that blocked USB syncing. So even though I paid for some good phones, I could not do something so simple as use the Motorola desktop software to sync contact information with my email addressbook. US Cellular worked with Motorola to completely disable the ability to write data to the phones. I only found this out, of course, after I purchased the d*****d software. They did the same thing with Nokia phones, as well. So, I laughed hard when I saw US Cellular whining about phone models. If they carried the iPhone, by the time they got done locking it down, it would be equivalent to a Motorola RAZR.
You have a good argument. I had an advanced data structures course in college many years ago. We got 7 programming assignments over the semester, building on the previous ones. The teacher released a "working program" after each due date, so that you had a choice of building on his or on yours if you couldn't get your last one working. Except he was incredibly lazy. He only showed up for the lecture portions, talked a bit about some data structure and pointer handling, and then left.
This was a top University, so he only "taught" 3 classes and had 5 TAs to help him, and he mostly researched. We didn't get graded assignments back until after the semester was over. And he didn't publish "correct" output from the code in advance, so we were all left wondering whether what we did was what he was looking for in our results. I took to burying comments about him in my code. I got an A, and there were no marks on any of my printouts when I got them back. I honestly think he just looked at the final exams.
As will be the way in these kinds of things, he was awarded a "top teacher" award the following year.
Slashdot Mirror
'How can we change the relationship so we think of these devices not as devices but as assistants or even companions?' he asked."
Add breasts?
Post something conservative and send them a bill.
Facebook probably has a valid complaint. If you follow the links all the way to the author's page, you will note that he calls it "Fluff Busting Purity, also known as F*** B*** Purity" and he continues to use the F*** B*** and F.B. terms throughout. It's pretty obviously just a smack in their "face." If he wants to avoid lawsuits, he should just name it "mysocialnetwork purity" or something completely unrelated to FB. Then they could do nothing about it.
This seems like a specious example; are there any list servers that are configured to allow 50MB attachments?
Yes. A number of them.
But more to the point, by moving email off-campus, the university's external link now has to carry what was formerly more contained within the faster local network. This will have some cost, either in paying for increased capacity or in suffering diminished connectivity.
Correct. That also calculates into this, on the opposite side of the points I was making - I was not arguing to off-net the email, only pointing out some of the reasoning used.
Backups require additional storage, tape or disk. Tape is sluggish, and a full system backup of a large mail server takes a lot of time. Brick level backups are worse. Restoring individuals' accidentally deleted emails is often time consuming, since they seldom can actually tell you the subject line of the message you're trying to restore for them, into their too-full mailbox.
Again, this seems specious. Does Google restore accidentally-deleted emails for users?
Your point is fallacious. While Google won't bother to offer the user that sort of service, system administrators of locally-owned email services at colleges/universities often don't have the ability to turn said requests/demands down. So my point is hardly specious, it's a definite support issue for some college IT staff in that they have to help users undelete things they shouldnt' have deleted.
Most campus mail systems are commercial applications, such as MS Exchange. They are costly, and the license fees for running them are often more costly and grow faster than your storage. Open source is a great alternative, but some administrations aren't too accepting of anything that they can't buy, for various reasons.
Are there serious universities that run student email on Exchange? I admit I haven't been everywhere, but I've sure never seen that.
Many colleges (not just universities) run Exchange. I'm not sure how you differentiate between serious and non-serious institutions. I know of colleges with only their staff/faculty accounts in Exchange, and others with student accounts in excess of 40,000, running Exchange. I also know of institutions where each department runs their own system, and Exchange pops up in some of the departments.
If you google "Microsoft Exchange college" or "Microsoft Exchange university" you will get thousands of links to higher education bodies running Exchange for at least some of their population. For example: Texas Christian University, Edinburgh Napier University, University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (45,000 employees), University of Kentucky, University of Sydney, University of Arkansas, Colorado State University, University of Connecticut, University of Miami Leonard M. Miller School of Medicine, Eastern Illinois University, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (if that's not a serious university in your definition, then there is no such thing), Pace University, University of South Carolina, University of Washington, California State University at Northridge, University of Virginia, University of New Orleans, University of Pittsburgh, Tufts University, and many many more. And I haven't even started pasting in "college" names (versus "university").
You really should get out more.
There are a number of good reasons for *not* hosting your own email.
None of this precludes the fact that there are compliance and privacy issues surrounding email. FERPA, HIPPA, GLB, SOX, and Privacy Act may all apply. It's not an easy decision. There are at least as many factors supporting retained hosting. Outsourcing student email hosting can make a lot of sense. I don't recommend outsourcing faculty/staff email for an educational institution, but there are certainly a lot of reasons to consider it.
Microsoft has a history of repressing the competition and its customers, and even of buying out members of standards committees to grab / keep marketshare. As a company, Microsoft shows no real ethics. Why would it start now?
been around the world several times. found braindead everywhere. especially so in english-speaking countries. but maybe that's just because i understood what they were saying more than most.
Colleges still have LOTS of exits. It's high schools and grade schools that are much more controlled.
You're obviously very young. Go a little further back, to the 60's and the Texas Massacre.
If I had an iPhone, I'd seriously consider not accepting further upgrades.
Exactly wrong. You need to learn more about the situation. Work for hire rules do not apply in all situations, and especially when contracts exist. Teachers are paid to teach, and little more. Public school contracts stipulate ownership of developed material, and the norm is for the teachers to own their work. Otherwise, they'd get paid more. It's one way that schools avoid paying higher salaries.
Yes, the dam can form at any point where the roof is not warm enough. Intuitively obvious?
Ice dams form, as in the link you provided, at the point where there is no heat, where the roof extends past the house exterior walls. This dome would be a very good example of a poorly insulated roof. The ice dam would thus form at ground level along the edge of the dome. Hence, my original comment about water runoff management (to prevent ice dams).
This would be a good deal larger dome than a sporting event dome, with active households and vehicles under it. There could be more heat trapped within it than a sports dome would trap. A sports dome has occasional occupation, versus the continuous occupation a city dome would have.
Plus, cities have politicians. This is a wonderful source of hot air.
keep in mind that the heat of the warm air rising in the dome would be sufficient to maintain it well above freezing. therefore, snow would not collect. there would have to be some allowances made in the design for water runoff during winter, which would cause some ice buildup around it from even light snows.
Exactly. The author must be a role player by choice. Not every game needs a story line. He probably never played poker or rummy as a kid, either.
Worse than just a breach of privacy of email, students use their college-provided accounts to communicate with their faculty. If other students are able to see their emails, that constitutes a potential FERPA breach. As a college IT administrator, I would be screaming at Google for not sharing info and reacting immediately. Waiting a day to shut the accounts down temporarily is inexcusable.
that this might be intelligent design after all.
1. A longer neural path between brain and vocal cords might force more time between thought and speech, although it's quite clear that many humans barely think before speaking.
2. Rerouting the nerve keeps it out of the way of the penis during fellatio.
3 years ago, Spamhaus was fined by a US federal court in Illinois. Of course, jurisdiction was the issue, and the US lost in the appeal. It was reported on here in slashdot. Makes the US no different from Belgium, except Belgian beer is better than ours. http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/09/05/1359232
No offence, but that's not insightful at all, that's just ignorant.
You must be new here. You will never get rated insightful if you conflict with a geek's opinion, regardless of the accuracy of your post. Also, you will always get a low score of 1 or 2. Conversely, geek whines are always rated insightful, 4 or 5 score.
In most of the country (at least in the US) you are rather limited on broadband access. There is typically a cable provider in the area, and many of them do not offer Internet access. There is typically a telephone provider that can provide you service, but even the big ones don't offer Internet access everywhere. [I live in a city-burb of Chicago, in a high-end neighborhood, and though I get dozens of leaflets from AT&T every year about cheaper, faster access, they don't offer it at my house. Go figure.] So most people in the US don't necessarily have a lot of choice.
The second piece of this is that if you want to always pay the cheapest rate, you're going to get shared, multiplexed service. If you want dedicated bandwidth, it's probably available to you. Just ask for business class service, which will give you a guaranteed rate. Of course, you're going to pay significantly different costs for guaranteed rates.
Finally, you have the option to complain as a customer to your provider, and to rally support with other consumers. Do it. Meanwhile, *everyone* knows that home Internet service is a multiplexed service, even if they don't know the term. It's like your subdivision street. Your provider will gradually increase bandwidth as the "street" gets busier. However, it makes little sense to invest $100,000 in a vault upgrade or add a $200/mo charge to their operation when 98% of a 100-home subdivision is barely using the bandwidth, and 1 or 2 users are constantly consuming all available bandwidth. They should pay for the upgrade. But they'd rather complain. The provider's obvious option is to shape them. Most of the time, that just means lowering priority for certain classes of traffic such as file sharing protocols (Gnutella, eDonkey, etc.) compared to interactive protocols such as http. Few bother to do rate limiting. Mostly, they just shape so that when the network is operating near capacity, the interactive stuff gets priority.
Meanwhile, no one else wants to bear the cost burden of increasing bandwidth just so Joey-down-the-block can share files with his buds across the planet. If my provider told me that they have to increase the costs in our area because Joey's complaining, I'd laugh and tell them to charge Joey.
Absolutely agreed. I'm 50, been CIO in two organizations, and an independent consultant. I keep my technical knowledge and my management skills polished all the time. I don't care about syntactic discussions in specific languages, but I do keep up to speed on infrastructure, convergence, systems hardening, security tools and techniques, risk management, and other areas. The political jungle is often the most challenging part. My age means nothing to the people I work for, except that it implies seasoned experience. My skill sets are everything. Just the way I want it.
Well, we knew most of this same information in the 60's/70's. Not exactly news now, we knew that sperm "aged" and degraded.
More work happened in the 90's. http://humrep.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/8/8/1251
Meanwhile, this article pretty well describes the reason that most slashdotters have (or will soon have) pattern baldness: http://www.steadyhealth.com/articles/Consequences_of_over_masturbation_a589_f0.html
And to top that off, the blogger's whole blog post was off-target. He completely ignores that fact that we've been in a recession, especially the news industry. How are they going to come up with the huge investment capital to move their systems over to clouds at a time like this? Basically, the blogger is a troll.
The most annoying part is that some of the carriers, such as US Cellular, disable some of the handset features so that you have to use their costly services to, for example, share a photo. US Cellular provides good service in their areas of coverage, but I had phones from them over a number of years that blocked USB syncing. So even though I paid for some good phones, I could not do something so simple as use the Motorola desktop software to sync contact information with my email addressbook. US Cellular worked with Motorola to completely disable the ability to write data to the phones. I only found this out, of course, after I purchased the d*****d software. They did the same thing with Nokia phones, as well. So, I laughed hard when I saw US Cellular whining about phone models. If they carried the iPhone, by the time they got done locking it down, it would be equivalent to a Motorola RAZR.
You have a good argument. I had an advanced data structures course in college many years ago. We got 7 programming assignments over the semester, building on the previous ones. The teacher released a "working program" after each due date, so that you had a choice of building on his or on yours if you couldn't get your last one working. Except he was incredibly lazy. He only showed up for the lecture portions, talked a bit about some data structure and pointer handling, and then left.
This was a top University, so he only "taught" 3 classes and had 5 TAs to help him, and he mostly researched. We didn't get graded assignments back until after the semester was over. And he didn't publish "correct" output from the code in advance, so we were all left wondering whether what we did was what he was looking for in our results. I took to burying comments about him in my code. I got an A, and there were no marks on any of my printouts when I got them back. I honestly think he just looked at the final exams.
As will be the way in these kinds of things, he was awarded a "top teacher" award the following year.