Compare how many people go the libraries with how many people shop online at Amazon.com. I expect that RFID sensor tag system to be a poor second choice to the corporate databases of Amazon...
Normally this guy is pretty on with these topics... Where did he go for the past year and clue out?
People already have "text box" blindness - if they're not interested, they're ignoring the boxes on the side. If they're actually LOOKING for something, however, those side boxes provide as good of information (sometimes better) than the PageRank Googlin' items that come up from a search.
They'll continue to work because they're advertisements assisting people instead of annoying the crapola out of the end user. For low impact, they're already ideally suited. And they work because they're focused on solving someone's problem, not just shoveling crap down their consumer throats.
They don't live in a vacuum, and they too can be undercut. It's all about the economics, and Microsoft is being a hell of a lot more nimble than they are. If they want their standard adopted, drop the freakin' price!
What you're asking for is Single Sign On - or a variation on the theme. Frankly, with Win2K and Active Directory, you've about got it all there. Linux+PAM+Kerb5 links in there beautifully, as does Solaris+Kerb5. The requirement then becomes to use Windows Active Directory as your Key Distribution Center, but if you lock the box down to some insane level, the risk is probably minimal.
I've used Linux Kerberos5 + Merit Radius as the KDC's in a previous job, as I prefered the security to Microsoft's relatively non-existant security.
As soon as you get the passwords all working from one point, you'll want account management... it goes to SSO from there.
Build an integrated account system for the various OS's that you have around campus. This ends up being a LOT more than spending money, although money is part of it. It's spending Campus political clout and providing a unified service to the students. One account, one authorization, no matter where you're going or what you need.
Clearly it's opportunity in the Unix space. IBM and Sun are both doing their damndest to sell their high-end gear to serve web pages, act as Samba shares, etc. And they get away with it too, because suits like the touchy-feely "we can blame someone" situation, even if they're paying out all holes for it.
Commodity hardware and a rough-neck OS (Linux or one of the BSD's) is THE way to go where IT spending has been hacked and services need to grow. Some companies have already figure this out. The rest are being stupid and/or blind.
I'm actually rather pleased they're attempting to get folks using IDE's in classes, although choice is one of the first things I personally want.
Actually, one of the reasons you'll see educational places doing this is pressure from above on making curriculum relevant. You teach someone Fortran on a VAX, and the folks handing money to the Higher Ed institution start asking interesting questions like:
But aren't folks mostly coding in C or C++ these days? Why isn't the school I'm helping fund teaching these useful things?
As I'm sure you're all aware, Higher Ed is a mainly reactionary force, and they see what the media prints like everyone else - that the Wintel platform has dominated the world, and that's what you'd better code for. Be glad they've gone with MW Codewarrior and not VB and the Microsoft IDE.
I for one am very glad that some institutions are starting to teach how to use an IDE, simply because my own school hasn't for so many years, and I end up being the one who helps bring student employees up to speed with working within a production code environment - cvs, IDE's, etc.
Microsoft is porting things to Mac OS X, sure - but they'll be porting to the "Carbon" interfaces - the same old Mac style API's - with only a few twists.
Even if they did port this all to "Aqua", it still a completely different windowing environment, and wouldn't mean squat for any of the other other *bsd environments.
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Compare how many people go the libraries with how many people shop online at Amazon.com. I expect that RFID sensor tag system to be a poor second choice to the corporate databases of Amazon...
Normally this guy is pretty on with these topics... Where did he go for the past year and clue out?
People already have "text box" blindness - if they're not interested, they're ignoring the boxes on the side. If they're actually LOOKING for something, however, those side boxes provide as good of information (sometimes better) than the PageRank Googlin' items that come up from a search.
They'll continue to work because they're advertisements assisting people instead of annoying the crapola out of the end user. For low impact, they're already ideally suited. And they work because they're focused on solving someone's problem, not just shoveling crap down their consumer throats.
They don't live in a vacuum, and they too can be undercut. It's all about the economics, and Microsoft is being a hell of a lot more nimble than they are. If they want their standard adopted, drop the freakin' price!
What you're asking for is Single Sign On - or a variation on the theme. Frankly, with Win2K and Active Directory, you've about got it all there. Linux+PAM+Kerb5 links in there beautifully, as does Solaris+Kerb5. The requirement then becomes to use Windows Active Directory as your Key Distribution Center, but if you lock the box down to some insane level, the risk is probably minimal.
I've used Linux Kerberos5 + Merit Radius as the KDC's in a previous job, as I prefered the security to Microsoft's relatively non-existant security.
As soon as you get the passwords all working from one point, you'll want account management... it goes to SSO from there.
Build an integrated account system for the various OS's that you have around campus. This ends up being a LOT more than spending money, although money is part of it. It's spending Campus political clout and providing a unified service to the students. One account, one authorization, no matter where you're going or what you need.
Clearly it's opportunity in the Unix space. IBM and Sun are both doing their damndest to sell their high-end gear to serve web pages, act as Samba shares, etc. And they get away with it too, because suits like the touchy-feely "we can blame someone" situation, even if they're paying out all holes for it.
Commodity hardware and a rough-neck OS (Linux or one of the BSD's) is THE way to go where IT spending has been hacked and services need to grow. Some companies have already figure this out. The rest are being stupid and/or blind.
You bet UNIX is a big area of growth for them.
Actually, one of the reasons you'll see educational places doing this is pressure from above on making curriculum relevant. You teach someone Fortran on a VAX, and the folks handing money to the Higher Ed institution start asking interesting questions like:
As I'm sure you're all aware, Higher Ed is a mainly reactionary force, and they see what the media prints like everyone else - that the Wintel platform has dominated the world, and that's what you'd better code for. Be glad they've gone with MW Codewarrior and not VB and the Microsoft IDE.
I for one am very glad that some institutions are starting to teach how to use an IDE, simply because my own school hasn't for so many years, and I end up being the one who helps bring student employees up to speed with working within a production code environment - cvs, IDE's, etc.
That's Mississippi State, not University of Missouri...
Microsoft is porting things to Mac OS X, sure - but they'll be porting to the "Carbon" interfaces - the same old Mac style API's - with only a few twists.
Even if they did port this all to "Aqua", it still a completely different windowing environment, and wouldn't mean squat for any of the other other *bsd environments.
So where do you find information about these ancient astronauts?