When I was working with MLTI MacBooks, SATA was not yet. You're an ass.
Today they deliver the 'imager' to each school, sometimes many. Back then, it was a USB drive. Our depot dropped it on a Firewire drive, which helped a lot. I still wanted a network multicast solution, but didn't figure out all of it before I got an offer I couldn't refuse.
Oh, and we were required by the program to use the specified drive method. Don't tell them we ported it to a Firewire case, which was not permitted. Oh, nevermind, tell them anything you wanna, that company is dead. They can suck eggs.
I would have looked to ThinkPad T series first, but Vaio gets mixed reviews. ThinkPads are only notebooks I would buy used, and I've never been disappointed.
Toughbooks are the best, but that's a different category. Some people claim Fujitsu makes good stuff, but not in my limited experience.
So there is nothing that I would consider to be in the median price range that compares.
And for a school, good enough should include being tough enough to live through a high school career. Maine's Laptop Initiative gave them to middle schoolers. It was comical to hear the explanations for cracked screens. There is, of course no explanation for a cracked screen, certainly not for one with a.22 hole in it.
Well, having had some experience with the Maine Laptop Initiative, their MacBooks did experience downtime due to system problems, and of course inevitable hardware failures.
School administrators that I worked with (I did Novell support for a few schools, and integrating their MacBooks into NetWare was nontrivial, but went pretty well) complained the most about having to re-image drives. They spent quite a bit of time optimizing that process, but there are only a few ways to re-image a MacBook, and none are fast enough. I could not get ZenWorks to do it, despite some heroic work by Novell engineers as a pet project. Oh well...
We were required to re-image the machines to a base system image after many repairs, most specifically hard drives and system boards. Data backup and restoration was the responsibility of the student and local administrators. It's their policy, we just had to follow the rules.
Our little business did well providing non-warranty repairs until both Apple and Apple dealers realized they were being cut out of the loop in a big way. I left before Apple got hard and cut off parts access. That was the end. But we saved some schools a little money along the way.
The MLTI has many lessons for other systems. Worth looking into before your school board leaps off the cliff.
You have to BE here to be receive your guaranteed rights (assuming you get them when you're here, that is...)
When re-entering the country, you might legally be considered to not yet be 'in' the country, and so you get limited or no rights. If you think this is bogus, Try arguing over a bottle of single-malt scotch with a Customs agent. They can strip-search you if they think there's either contraband or declarable goods on or in you. Yes, they can.
Tax authorities get away with a lot in the US. Whether that's proper or not is not the issue here - just what is currently practiced. That's another fight, reining in the IRS.
Now, how they justified holding laptops indefinitely bothered me. First, once you've entered, you do get to be a citizen and get your property, and even Customs only holds stuff for so long and then either gives it up or destroys it (ugh). But more to the point, what good is the laptop as an intelligence source 6 months from now? Actually, if they let you walk, it might not be any good within an hour, if you notify your co-conspiritors that the information is out of your hands. Kinda stupid.
And then we have the whole problem of ICE/Customs looking for anything contraband, even some types of pr0n. By this measure, they will need to search you for even a MicroSD card, and I can keep one of those under my tongue. A losing battle, boys. Keep focusing on the Scotch, ok? And of course terrorist-looking people.
We're a little stuck, but rocking out of the hole
on
Time To Dump XP?
·
· Score: 1
We're still on XP SP2, IE7, but Office 07 is coming out.
I expect we will see a hardware refresh next year, and that is the right time to go to Win7.
And we changed desktop AND system support from one evil overlord to another evil overlord:
Previous evil overlord was cautious, thorough, and meticulous with image development and provisioning. Stuff worked, but changes took months. Crashes infrequent, BSODs even more infrequent, reimaging events so rare as to be a cause for celebration. Overall well organized and competent.
New evil overlord has a 'cowboy' mentality, slams in changes and has played fast and loose with images, reducing the count from hundreds to perhaps 80. Our team affected as new hires now get an image that that includes *most* of the features we *require* (as in non-negotiable), but they are nonresponsive to requests for the previous image. Despite being quick on the draw to make changes to the corporate images, they have raised customer avoidance to a new level. If you place a call and aren't available to answer their reply call, they mark you off as 'resolved'. Nice. If you knew who this outfit was, you would be somewhat astonished. No, it is not IBM. BSODs not so uncommon, but not an issue. Reimaging is the answer to all sorts of problems, including network privilege problems. Oooh boy. Not yet so competent, but I have faith that they will get it about 3 months before they pass the torch to the next bid winner, who will be the previous evil overlord. Save us from this coming 'in-house', please.
And the customer app I support is not compatible with Win7 - no plans to fix it, and we have not had good luck with Compatability Mode. We will be in an interesting place. Did you know Access 07 cannot convert a database back to Access 97 format? Way fun.
Moving to Win7 presents me with a unique problem - we work in a Lotus Notes email environment, with plans to cave to Microsoft^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^^H move to Exchange probably still 18 months out, Notes apps being the sticking point. Our dev teams have succeeded in developing web-based replacements that can't tolerate IE8, and have converted maybe 10% of all apps, including all of ours - and all of ours don't work correctly, but are 'working as designed'. Pus.
We should be stuck on XP until 2Q11 if not longer, but I know somewhere there is pressure to move faster. Our current hardware would work, but I suspect they may acclerate a refresh and solve the problems with new machines.
Apparently 'they' are hiring people to do what can be done.
They need more resources, mostly in the form of materials to deal with the oil.
And don't forget, the initial response, to build sand berms to deflect the incoming oil from marshlands, was deferred to the EPA for permitting. An example of not marshaling the resources of the U.S. Government, and making something good happen. Pretty much a no brainer, sand berms would threaten wetlands and change currents, salinity, and of course impact wildlife. Oil slicks would poison the wetlands for years if not decades. Most everyone on the Lousiana shoreline wanted berms built to prevent the greater tragedy of oil ashore.
It's not really that simple but actually it is. Mitigation first, prevention where possible, cleanup where necessary. Relying on cleanup alone means decades of pain, and is the worst and most costly response. Time to kick some ass, isn't it?
"Please, knocking out the power grid or making all the red lights turn green or whatever they're afraid of is nothing like having a bullet penetrate someone or a bomb going off - it's almost impossible, if not impossible to kill someone by hacking into a computer."
What the hell are you doing on Slashdot?
Turn all the traffic lights green in even a small part of Los Angeles, and I think it's likely someone will die in an accident caused, proximately, by the hacking of the traffic control system. Simple enough.
Crippling a cell system might result in the failure of any number of people to make contact and deliver critical information, resulting in accidents, mistakes, lack of care, and those could result in needless deaths.
If your definition of 'warfare' must include deadly force, then much of what we think of as 'cyberwarfare' doesn't meet that definition. Emptying bank accounts, DDOS attacks, defacing websites, etc. probably don't quite rise to the definition of deadly force. But I have only the one example of traffic control. Oh, another one - disabling at least some of the electrical grid seems to be possible, and blackouts can easily result in deaths.
There's plenty of hype around 'cyberwarfare'. Now to listen to the hype around 'smart grids', and how people will feel when their refirgerators get turned off during the day, or the furnace runs continuously on 103 days. Or any number of interesting nuisances that aren't fatal (except for your plants, pets, and bed-ridden grandmother) but are sure a pain.
Oh yeah. Grandma. She might not think it's to hot until she's too faint to reach the phone.
"The political system is broken partly because of Internet," Barlow said. "It's made it impossible to govern anything the size of the nation-state. We're going back to the city-state. The nation-state is ungovernably information-rich."
And then this:
"Speaking at Personal Democracy Forum in New York on Thursday, Barlow said there is too much going on at every level in Washington, D.C., for the government to effectively handle everything on its plate. Instead, he advocated citizens organizing around the issues most important to them."
Ok, so which it? Too much information, or too much government?
I can tell you, in my opinion, if you think you have too much information about the government, you have too much government. And if the complaint really is that there is too much going on in Washington for citizens to make sense of because they can actually get information on it, there is TOO MUCH going on in Washington.
Nice try, though.
I also read this comment:
"I explained it like this: Would you, in Sweden, approve of someone in Portugal being able to set laws that regulated what you did?"
Um, that sounds EXACTLY LIKE THE EU. Except Portugal needs to get a few other nations to gang up on Sweden. Look into the feta cheese controversy in the EU. Nice. This is an argument for or against states' rights and Article Ten how?
True, but they often serve different purposes. Yes, taxes are used to modify behavior, as subsidies are.
Notice you don't pay tax on a newspaper, but you do on a book? Wait - in the past few years, some states and other jurisdictions have in fact imposed sales taxes on newspapers. A major shift.
I thought this was intended to avoid infringing on the First Amendment, but it seems that while the Federal government has subsidized periodicals since 1792, more recently reducing the subsidy greatly but still discounting postal rates by about $270 million a year at last count. Not a lot, but...
We essentially pay for periodical postage, to the tune of less than a dollar a year for each man, woman, and child in the U.S., roughly. Probably about 3 bucks per taxpayer.
Still, the FTC idea is WAY beyond this. And repulsive. This isn't about encouraging an active and effective press to inform the electorate. It's about preserving a failing industry out of nostalgia more than anything exceptionally useful. And it's about our apparent unwillingness to pay for the journalism we are getting.
I may be off on this, but television journalism is doing ok. Print media are dying, because they can't attract enough revenue, be it subscribers and/or advertisers. Internet media seem to mostly survive on advertising alone.
Does anyone really believe that the New York Times is going to attract enough online subscribers to survive JUST because they have an iPad app? Really? iPad come with an e-reader app built-in that gets tons of news, current events, and discussions. It's called Safari. Free wins.
'Subsidies' are one thing. Most subsidies noted at that link were along the lines of paying topublish legal notices, and of course discounts from the Postal Service, which is probably trying to bail on those right now.
But taxing anything to directly support newspaper publishers is offensive. Offensive. And clearly (IMHO) a violation of the First Amendment. The opportunities for abuse are spectacularly apparent. This needs to fail immediately.
Now, if they really want to tax something to prop up newspapers, how about Internet service? Oh, wait, that would also be a First Amendment problem, I think.
So we didn't tax radios and television despite their impact on newspaper circulation. How is this different?
Amazing. We do need to vote them ALL out. Repeatedly.
Is that the number of *known* species? If so, obviously someone should just total them up, no guessing needed.
Of course, since this is about the *actual* species, many of which are apparently either unrecognized, uncataloged, or just plain unknown, then this number is plain made up too.
Woo. I'm impressed. No wonder people don't believe Science. It's too much guessing disguised as knowledge.
We do this today with QR codes and smartphones. My Android handles this just fine. I've even gotten a QR off the window of a yogurt shop to send the location to Facebook friends.
Sorry, professor, you're late to this party.
ps- I messed around with CueCats a while a go, got a dozen for free. Hack the firmware and they were useful scanners. Took them apart and they got embedded in all kinds of stuff, from a keyboard to my back door. They did have issues, but like the i-Opener I had, cheap/free stuff was fun to mangle. Nowadays, everyone wants you to use some Arduino thing instead. Feh. Gimme hackable hardware $5 and I'm ok with having to solder a little bit.
I've submitted stories and got rejected without explanation. Sort of like Internet dating, and for the same reasons.
I pretty much don't bother to submit unless it caught my eye and seemed out of the norm for/. (interesting, out of the mainstream, and understandable to a normal person, yeah I know, pine inthe sky)./. is not a democracy. Get used to it. I vote with my page views, so if you're offended out there in/. admin land, you can get over it too. Happy, Visiting, or Complaining. Any 2 of the three. Logic need not apply.
Slashdot Mirror
When I was working with MLTI MacBooks, SATA was not yet. You're an ass.
Today they deliver the 'imager' to each school, sometimes many. Back then, it was a USB drive. Our depot dropped it on a Firewire drive, which helped a lot. I still wanted a network multicast solution, but didn't figure out all of it before I got an offer I couldn't refuse.
Oh, and we were required by the program to use the specified drive method. Don't tell them we ported it to a Firewire case, which was not permitted. Oh, nevermind, tell them anything you wanna, that company is dead. They can suck eggs.
I would have looked to ThinkPad T series first, but Vaio gets mixed reviews. ThinkPads are only notebooks I would buy used, and I've never been disappointed.
Toughbooks are the best, but that's a different category. Some people claim Fujitsu makes good stuff, but not in my limited experience.
So there is nothing that I would consider to be in the median price range that compares.
And for a school, good enough should include being tough enough to live through a high school career. Maine's Laptop Initiative gave them to middle schoolers. It was comical to hear the explanations for cracked screens. There is, of course no explanation for a cracked screen, certainly not for one with a .22 hole in it.
Well, having had some experience with the Maine Laptop Initiative, their MacBooks did experience downtime due to system problems, and of course inevitable hardware failures.
School administrators that I worked with (I did Novell support for a few schools, and integrating their MacBooks into NetWare was nontrivial, but went pretty well) complained the most about having to re-image drives. They spent quite a bit of time optimizing that process, but there are only a few ways to re-image a MacBook, and none are fast enough. I could not get ZenWorks to do it, despite some heroic work by Novell engineers as a pet project. Oh well...
We were required to re-image the machines to a base system image after many repairs, most specifically hard drives and system boards. Data backup and restoration was the responsibility of the student and local administrators. It's their policy, we just had to follow the rules.
Our little business did well providing non-warranty repairs until both Apple and Apple dealers realized they were being cut out of the loop in a big way. I left before Apple got hard and cut off parts access. That was the end. But we saved some schools a little money along the way.
The MLTI has many lessons for other systems. Worth looking into before your school board leaps off the cliff.
"Apple's not the most expensive vendor in the market. Their laptops are quite price competitive for the quality of the device and software."
What PC vendor(s) and model(s) do you compare Apple to?
This is why we have to vote...
A friend of mine is in Turkey now. He doesn't enjoy the same rights there as he does here.
Your rights must protected and enforced.
You have to BE here to be receive your guaranteed rights (assuming you get them when you're here, that is...)
When re-entering the country, you might legally be considered to not yet be 'in' the country, and so you get limited or no rights. If you think this is bogus, Try arguing over a bottle of single-malt scotch with a Customs agent. They can strip-search you if they think there's either contraband or declarable goods on or in you. Yes, they can.
Tax authorities get away with a lot in the US. Whether that's proper or not is not the issue here - just what is currently practiced. That's another fight, reining in the IRS.
Now, how they justified holding laptops indefinitely bothered me. First, once you've entered, you do get to be a citizen and get your property, and even Customs only holds stuff for so long and then either gives it up or destroys it (ugh). But more to the point, what good is the laptop as an intelligence source 6 months from now? Actually, if they let you walk, it might not be any good within an hour, if you notify your co-conspiritors that the information is out of your hands. Kinda stupid.
And then we have the whole problem of ICE/Customs looking for anything contraband, even some types of pr0n. By this measure, they will need to search you for even a MicroSD card, and I can keep one of those under my tongue. A losing battle, boys. Keep focusing on the Scotch, ok? And of course terrorist-looking people.
We're still on XP SP2, IE7, but Office 07 is coming out.
I expect we will see a hardware refresh next year, and that is the right time to go to Win7.
And we changed desktop AND system support from one evil overlord to another evil overlord:
Previous evil overlord was cautious, thorough, and meticulous with image development and provisioning. Stuff worked, but changes took months. Crashes infrequent, BSODs even more infrequent, reimaging events so rare as to be a cause for celebration. Overall well organized and competent.
New evil overlord has a 'cowboy' mentality, slams in changes and has played fast and loose with images, reducing the count from hundreds to perhaps 80. Our team affected as new hires now get an image that that includes *most* of the features we *require* (as in non-negotiable), but they are nonresponsive to requests for the previous image. Despite being quick on the draw to make changes to the corporate images, they have raised customer avoidance to a new level. If you place a call and aren't available to answer their reply call, they mark you off as 'resolved'. Nice. If you knew who this outfit was, you would be somewhat astonished. No, it is not IBM. BSODs not so uncommon, but not an issue. Reimaging is the answer to all sorts of problems, including network privilege problems. Oooh boy. Not yet so competent, but I have faith that they will get it about 3 months before they pass the torch to the next bid winner, who will be the previous evil overlord. Save us from this coming 'in-house', please.
And the customer app I support is not compatible with Win7 - no plans to fix it, and we have not had good luck with Compatability Mode. We will be in an interesting place. Did you know Access 07 cannot convert a database back to Access 97 format? Way fun.
Moving to Win7 presents me with a unique problem - we work in a Lotus Notes email environment, with plans to cave to Microsoft^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^^H move to Exchange probably still 18 months out, Notes apps being the sticking point. Our dev teams have succeeded in developing web-based replacements that can't tolerate IE8, and have converted maybe 10% of all apps, including all of ours - and all of ours don't work correctly, but are 'working as designed'. Pus.
We should be stuck on XP until 2Q11 if not longer, but I know somewhere there is pressure to move faster. Our current hardware would work, but I suspect they may acclerate a refresh and solve the problems with new machines.
Apparently 'they' are hiring people to do what can be done.
They need more resources, mostly in the form of materials to deal with the oil.
And don't forget, the initial response, to build sand berms to deflect the incoming oil from marshlands, was deferred to the EPA for permitting. An example of not marshaling the resources of the U.S. Government, and making something good happen. Pretty much a no brainer, sand berms would threaten wetlands and change currents, salinity, and of course impact wildlife. Oil slicks would poison the wetlands for years if not decades. Most everyone on the Lousiana shoreline wanted berms built to prevent the greater tragedy of oil ashore.
It's not really that simple but actually it is. Mitigation first, prevention where possible, cleanup where necessary. Relying on cleanup alone means decades of pain, and is the worst and most costly response. Time to kick some ass, isn't it?
Another place to do chores for NOTHING.
What is this fascination with farming? Oh yeah, that's right. The computer version doesn't smell.
The stupid part, ya got right.
Kinda like watching all those WWII movies. Yeah, they were glamorized, mostly, and real people don't die like that.
But real people died in the real thing.
Agreed. Any color will do. Yellow may be the most confusing of all...
Fools rush in...
Typo. My bad.
"Please, knocking out the power grid or making all the red lights turn green or whatever they're afraid of is nothing like having a bullet penetrate someone or a bomb going off - it's almost impossible, if not impossible to kill someone by hacking into a computer."
What the hell are you doing on Slashdot?
Turn all the traffic lights green in even a small part of Los Angeles, and I think it's likely someone will die in an accident caused, proximately, by the hacking of the traffic control system. Simple enough.
Crippling a cell system might result in the failure of any number of people to make contact and deliver critical information, resulting in accidents, mistakes, lack of care, and those could result in needless deaths.
If your definition of 'warfare' must include deadly force, then much of what we think of as 'cyberwarfare' doesn't meet that definition. Emptying bank accounts, DDOS attacks, defacing websites, etc. probably don't quite rise to the definition of deadly force. But I have only the one example of traffic control. Oh, another one - disabling at least some of the electrical grid seems to be possible, and blackouts can easily result in deaths.
There's plenty of hype around 'cyberwarfare'. Now to listen to the hype around 'smart grids', and how people will feel when their refirgerators get turned off during the day, or the furnace runs continuously on 103 days. Or any number of interesting nuisances that aren't fatal (except for your plants, pets, and bed-ridden grandmother) but are sure a pain.
Oh yeah. Grandma. She might not think it's to hot until she's too faint to reach the phone.
Food for thought. Go smart grids, go!
Corrections:
Wellies are back in style for men. Supermodels and grannies have never left the fold.
And of course, you can now look goofy, have cold feet, and get electrocuted all at once.
Nice. The British, ever helful. Spot on, I say!
I saw this in TFA:
"The political system is broken partly because of Internet," Barlow said. "It's made it impossible to govern anything the size of the nation-state. We're going back to the city-state. The nation-state is ungovernably information-rich."
And then this:
"Speaking at Personal Democracy Forum in New York on Thursday, Barlow said there is too much going on at every level in Washington, D.C., for the government to effectively handle everything on its plate. Instead, he advocated citizens organizing around the issues most important to them."
Ok, so which it? Too much information, or too much government?
I can tell you, in my opinion, if you think you have too much information about the government, you have too much government. And if the complaint really is that there is too much going on in Washington for citizens to make sense of because they can actually get information on it, there is TOO MUCH going on in Washington.
Nice try, though.
I also read this comment:
"I explained it like this: Would you, in Sweden, approve of someone in Portugal being able to set laws that regulated what you did?"
Um, that sounds EXACTLY LIKE THE EU. Except Portugal needs to get a few other nations to gang up on Sweden. Look into the feta cheese controversy in the EU. Nice. This is an argument for or against states' rights and Article Ten how?
My lunch partner used 5.5GB last month. Many podcasts, a few higher quality videos, and swapping a lot of music in and out. Same the month before.
You are not using your iPhone very extensively, relatively speaking.
And he's grandfathered in for now. They could change their terms and soft cap him.
True, but they often serve different purposes. Yes, taxes are used to modify behavior, as subsidies are.
Notice you don't pay tax on a newspaper, but you do on a book? Wait - in the past few years, some states and other jurisdictions have in fact imposed sales taxes on newspapers. A major shift.
I thought this was intended to avoid infringing on the First Amendment, but it seems that while the Federal government has subsidized periodicals since 1792, more recently reducing the subsidy greatly but still discounting postal rates by about $270 million a year at last count. Not a lot, but...
We essentially pay for periodical postage, to the tune of less than a dollar a year for each man, woman, and child in the U.S., roughly. Probably about 3 bucks per taxpayer.
Still, the FTC idea is WAY beyond this. And repulsive. This isn't about encouraging an active and effective press to inform the electorate. It's about preserving a failing industry out of nostalgia more than anything exceptionally useful. And it's about our apparent unwillingness to pay for the journalism we are getting.
I may be off on this, but television journalism is doing ok. Print media are dying, because they can't attract enough revenue, be it subscribers and/or advertisers. Internet media seem to mostly survive on advertising alone.
Does anyone really believe that the New York Times is going to attract enough online subscribers to survive JUST because they have an iPad app? Really? iPad come with an e-reader app built-in that gets tons of news, current events, and discussions. It's called Safari. Free wins.
Um, Folding and SETI on all your phones would indeed process a lot of data.
And kill a lot of batteries.
Nice idea, not. All your chargers are belong to us.
What makes you think he wouldn't be using Ableton?
'Subsidies' are one thing. Most subsidies noted at that link were along the lines of paying topublish legal notices, and of course discounts from the Postal Service, which is probably trying to bail on those right now.
But taxing anything to directly support newspaper publishers is offensive. Offensive. And clearly (IMHO) a violation of the First Amendment. The opportunities for abuse are spectacularly apparent. This needs to fail immediately.
Now, if they really want to tax something to prop up newspapers, how about Internet service? Oh, wait, that would also be a First Amendment problem, I think.
So we didn't tax radios and television despite their impact on newspaper circulation. How is this different?
Amazing. We do need to vote them ALL out. Repeatedly.
Huh? I think you posted even less content than I did. That's usually pretty easy, but I think you meant to be more relevant.
We have both failed.
Is that the number of *known* species? If so, obviously someone should just total them up, no guessing needed.
Of course, since this is about the *actual* species, many of which are apparently either unrecognized, uncataloged, or just plain unknown, then this number is plain made up too.
Woo. I'm impressed. No wonder people don't believe Science. It's too much guessing disguised as knowledge.
We do this today with QR codes and smartphones. My Android handles this just fine. I've even gotten a QR off the window of a yogurt shop to send the location to Facebook friends.
Sorry, professor, you're late to this party.
ps- I messed around with CueCats a while a go, got a dozen for free. Hack the firmware and they were useful scanners. Took them apart and they got embedded in all kinds of stuff, from a keyboard to my back door. They did have issues, but like the i-Opener I had, cheap/free stuff was fun to mangle. Nowadays, everyone wants you to use some Arduino thing instead. Feh. Gimme hackable hardware $5 and I'm ok with having to solder a little bit.
Quit yer whinin.
I've submitted stories and got rejected without explanation. Sort of like Internet dating, and for the same reasons.
I pretty much don't bother to submit unless it caught my eye and seemed out of the norm for /. (interesting, out of the mainstream, and understandable to a normal person, yeah I know, pine inthe sky). /. is not a democracy. Get used to it. I vote with my page views, so if you're offended out there in /. admin land, you can get over it too. Happy, Visiting, or Complaining. Any 2 of the three. Logic need not apply.