It is a 2000+ user network, with a maximum of 750~ computers - my CALs are per device, not per user - no point getting per user CALs when I can only support 750~ max at any one time.
If you don't mind, what software are you running that is being counted here?
Staffing costs (since we're getting into the nitty-gritty) are broken down as follows; £30k for me, £15k each for the two technicians. Not exactly fantastic wages, but for them it is a good start considering they are 17/18 - they'll gain fantastic experience before we loose them to somewhere better.
I'm a big advocate of thin clients - the reduction in TCO and the reduced need for desktop support are big plus points. I have 160-odd thin clients at present - a mix of Wyse, Neoware, Neoware m100 notebooks, Sun ray Ones, and some RM-badged laptops I've rebuilt with thin station. If this continues to grow, my options are as follows - virtualise, more terminal services, or go for the LTSP I've discussed elsewhere. That decision is likely to be user led.
My comment further up discusses how much Microsoft licensing costs - approximately £12,000 per year. This is not a massive cost, given the size of my network (2000+ users, 750~ devices, various MS software, terminal service licensing, etc).
I am vendor agnostic - I believe in using the best tool for the job. However, and this is the kicker - I am led by the needs of my users, and to a certain extent, led by the decisions that have been made by my predecessors.
My problem is not the students - I'm running a trial of a LTSP / thin client trial (using old sun ray ones) at present. It fully integrates with my AD and the desktop experience hasn't been a problem. OO / Firefox are just fine for what the students need within the context of the trial. Of course, to be fair, I have a trial using Wyse S50s and Terminal Services on Server 2003, and again, the software provided (Office 2003 / IE etc) is just fine.
But what about the software used by the Admin Staff? Windows Only. What about the Finance Software? Windows Only. The MIS software? Windows Only. The Electronic Registration Software? Web based, but only works in IE. What about the subject specific software? Windows Only.
I didn't make the decision to purchase any of that software - the respective departments made that decision long before I got this job. Things are moving forward with regards to opening the software up, specifically moving to web capable apps - and yes I will be making sure anything web-based is cross-brower compatible.
Now yes, there are workarounds for the various problems I list above. I'll be honest - with 3 full time staff who are busy keeping the current network running, there simply is not the resource available to even begin assessing how we might shift away from our current set-up.
I've made the best start I can - proving that an OSS-based solution can work - the thin client trial. The next step is to target other areas where that trial can grow into. If my users are happy, then I'm happy; but I won't force a solution on to them without proving it really can work. I hope that I'm being responsible in that regard.
Well I am one of those 'morons' - and there are a few good reasons (my comment further up explains some of them) why I choose to use the school agreement - and if there was a cheaper / easier way of doing it, I guarantee you I would be using it.
Unless you are lucky enough to be a Grammar school, or an Academy, your ICT funding is always embarrassingly low - we crimp and save wherever possible just to keep things running.
It would cost nothing in terms of hardware and software.
What would it cost to migrate, in terms of staff / student training? What would it cost to get my two technicians up to spend on OSS? What would it cost to migrate?
The truth of the matter is there are three ICT staff at the college - myself and two technicians. Running a 2000+ user network is one thing; running that network and migrating to a completely new way of doing things is something you don't undertake lightly.
I'm getting there - slowly. I'm pushing for thin clients to start with - reducing our dependancy on 'the latest and greatest' hardware. The next thing will be to replace the 2003 Terminal Services with linux-based ones. One step at a time - thats the plan.
Well I'm a Sys Admin / Network Manager in a school in the UK.
Truth of the matter is I have approximately 2% of the school budget made available to me; this equates to about £150,000. Using that money, I run a 2000+ user network, with nearly 750 attached devices (thin clients, fat clients, printers, etc).
I run an almost entirely Microsoft shop - 2000/2003/Exchange/XP/XPe, with Office 2003 / Encarta / Project as well. In terms of non-MS OS, take your pic from Debian, Thinstation and a host of Linux-based thin client devices (Neoware, Wyse, etc).
My Microsoft licensing costs come in at around £12,000 per year, this also includes my terminal service licensing. Is that a lot? Not really - the buy price for 650+ copies of XP, Office, plus CALs for Exchange, 2003 and Terminal Services is prohibatively high imho.
BECTA can complain about the terms of the agreement, and suggest we spend our money 'up front', but unless they are going to provide funding, I'm afraid to say I'll stick with the Schools Agreement for now.
I'd love to have the money to buy outright, don't get me wrong. But for a school with a relatively low income (ie our students come from a high socio-economic area) I simply can't afford to do it - £12,000 a year is however a manageable cost.
Well, in that case the businesses concerned deserve everything they get for making a poor choice in hosting - be interesting the see what the status pages of the affected sites throw up as a reason when they come back up - and what steps those businesses will be taking to avoid the failures.
As a poster has commented elsewhere mind you, they could've (should've) enabled some kind of redundancy themselves with split-site hosting.
Yeah, I don't get those screenshots either - the RDP window is Vista, but the contents are XP... I'm willing to call bullshit on this as well - nothing more than anti-MS FUD without verification.
Who in their right minds decided to use 180 metres a second?
Call it 432mph and it'll make a lot more sense. (Calculation made roughly!)
That said, 432mph doesn't sound that fast to me. Ok, it is a helluva lot faster than storms here on earth, but I thought the majority of passenger jets travelled around the 500mph, which certainly makes it sound less impressive to me.
The first thing I do when I get a phone (and I'm always getting models a few months behind the curve to save a few £££s) is get it unlocked, and then I flash the firmware.
Orange (in the UK) are well known for branding their phones and removing features. Now I don't think we'll see this with the iPhone as Apple are unlikely to let telcos 'brand' the OS, but hooking directly into certain media streams is quite likely. It won't bother Joe Consumer, but I will certainly avoid anything that doesn't let me choose my own services.
... There isn't a cat in hells chance of the iPhone touching the iPods market.
Why?
Price for one. For $499 (with contract), you can get yourself a 4GB iPhone. For $349 you can get an 80GB iPod. That is a least expensive vs most expensive comparison.
The iPod (well, portable digital music player) market is huge; the numbers speak for themselves. People will happily pay a few hundred dollars for a portable player that'll last a few years. But $499 for a phone, plus contract? That is out of most peoples leagues for something that is completely unproven, if you ask me.
I guess the point is that we *should* be switching our machines off whenever possible as opposed to leaving them running for no reason. The home user isn't going to be persuaded by Linux if he/she has to wait a long time to actually get a computer into a usable state*.
To be fair, my Windows box boots pretty quick; I think the time between power on and desktop is somewhere in the region of 50 seconds. The method of loading the core services - desktop - additional services at least gives the impression of speed, even through the disk continues to thrash for another 45 seconds as applications load in the background.
* Jokes about Windows never being usable even after booting can be inserted here as required!;)
"Like it or not, the vast majority of online entertainment media is now acquired for free on P2P file sharing networks, and BigChampagne is there."
Cue lots of rubbish about network operation centres and live feed monitoring. Anyone want to throw out ideas about how they really monitor this stuff? Is there a way of downloading torrents with a client and finding out exact data transfers automatically?
I've heard of more likely things to be honest; but certainly combining a phish attempt with something like this isn't beyond the realms of impossibility. To offer my 2p, I called my bank once to change address and managed to guess my 'secret' password when the phone rep gave me a clue. To this day, I still don't remember what the secret originally was.
And since they're charming people, I have no qualms about posting their method here;
Now you may be wondering HOW do we get your information? its easy, you call 18004myxbox pretend to be that person make up a story about how your little brother put in the information on the account and it was all fake, blah blah blah you might get one little piece of information per call but then you keep calling and keep calling everytime getting a little bit more information every time. once you have enough information you can get the Pasword on the windows live ID Reset, they may tell you they cant but its bull shit. people at bungie CAN and WILL reset your password. believe me:)
So, sounds like a classic social engineering scheme, as opposed to 'hacking the system'. Even so, you have to wonder if phone reps really are giving out information, even if it is a small amount. Anyone tried getting information out of the phone reps yet?
He downloaded material without bothering to make sure that what he was downloading was what he needed in order to play the music.
CDs and cassettes have been runaway successes in the past precisely because they avoided this kind of problem; you didn't need to 'research' anything to get what you wanted. You buy the CD, it works in any CD player. Of course various companies have got egg on their face when they tried to ignore the red book standards; hello Sony.
So a consumer assumed downloadable music would work the same way. A rather honest mistake in my eyes. I don't think the onus should be on consumers to research downloadable music, the players and the various formats.
As for his actions afterwards, well, that is a different matter. But I don't think anyone should be made to jump through hoops just to get an online content.
But given that most airlines (at those in the UK) are freely dishing out our personal information to the US whenever we travel there, does this statement really hold true anymore?
Actually, that last sentance in your comment is quite interesting I think.
If it costs $1/gallon to ship water to a given location and the cost of water generated by the windmill device is $1.10/gallon, the windmill device is useless.
Since we're talking about the enviroment, and to do the run-around on my initial comment, there is the enviromental cost of transporting water any considerable distance. I can't think of anywhere off-hand, but there must be situations where water is transported instead of local water being used. A post further up mentions China as a prime example. The local water supply (ground based) is contaminated because of heavy industry. I'm certain throwing a few of these into remote villages would certainly make sense.
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£3000pa? You are getting shafted mate, surely?
It is a 2000+ user network, with a maximum of 750~ computers - my CALs are per device, not per user - no point getting per user CALs when I can only support 750~ max at any one time.
If you don't mind, what software are you running that is being counted here?
Staffing costs (since we're getting into the nitty-gritty) are broken down as follows; £30k for me, £15k each for the two technicians. Not exactly fantastic wages, but for them it is a good start considering they are 17/18 - they'll gain fantastic experience before we loose them to somewhere better.
I'm a big advocate of thin clients - the reduction in TCO and the reduced need for desktop support are big plus points. I have 160-odd thin clients at present - a mix of Wyse, Neoware, Neoware m100 notebooks, Sun ray Ones, and some RM-badged laptops I've rebuilt with thin station. If this continues to grow, my options are as follows - virtualise, more terminal services, or go for the LTSP I've discussed elsewhere. That decision is likely to be user led.
My comment further up discusses how much Microsoft licensing costs - approximately £12,000 per year. This is not a massive cost, given the size of my network (2000+ users, 750~ devices, various MS software, terminal service licensing, etc).
I am vendor agnostic - I believe in using the best tool for the job. However, and this is the kicker - I am led by the needs of my users, and to a certain extent, led by the decisions that have been made by my predecessors.
My problem is not the students - I'm running a trial of a LTSP / thin client trial (using old sun ray ones) at present. It fully integrates with my AD and the desktop experience hasn't been a problem. OO / Firefox are just fine for what the students need within the context of the trial. Of course, to be fair, I have a trial using Wyse S50s and Terminal Services on Server 2003, and again, the software provided (Office 2003 / IE etc) is just fine.
But what about the software used by the Admin Staff? Windows Only. What about the Finance Software? Windows Only. The MIS software? Windows Only. The Electronic Registration Software? Web based, but only works in IE. What about the subject specific software? Windows Only.
I didn't make the decision to purchase any of that software - the respective departments made that decision long before I got this job. Things are moving forward with regards to opening the software up, specifically moving to web capable apps - and yes I will be making sure anything web-based is cross-brower compatible.
Now yes, there are workarounds for the various problems I list above. I'll be honest - with 3 full time staff who are busy keeping the current network running, there simply is not the resource available to even begin assessing how we might shift away from our current set-up.
I've made the best start I can - proving that an OSS-based solution can work - the thin client trial. The next step is to target other areas where that trial can grow into. If my users are happy, then I'm happy; but I won't force a solution on to them without proving it really can work. I hope that I'm being responsible in that regard.
Well I am one of those 'morons' - and there are a few good reasons (my comment further up explains some of them) why I choose to use the school agreement - and if there was a cheaper / easier way of doing it, I guarantee you I would be using it.
Unless you are lucky enough to be a Grammar school, or an Academy, your ICT funding is always embarrassingly low - we crimp and save wherever possible just to keep things running.
Heh, yeah, I know. The wonders of free hosting from a mate - when the box goes down for some reason you feel a bit guilty asking them to fix it...
It would cost nothing in terms of hardware and software.
What would it cost to migrate, in terms of staff / student training? What would it cost to get my two technicians up to spend on OSS? What would it cost to migrate?
The truth of the matter is there are three ICT staff at the college - myself and two technicians. Running a 2000+ user network is one thing; running that network and migrating to a completely new way of doing things is something you don't undertake lightly.
I'm getting there - slowly. I'm pushing for thin clients to start with - reducing our dependancy on 'the latest and greatest' hardware. The next thing will be to replace the 2003 Terminal Services with linux-based ones. One step at a time - thats the plan.
Well I'm a Sys Admin / Network Manager in a school in the UK.
Truth of the matter is I have approximately 2% of the school budget made available to me; this equates to about £150,000. Using that money, I run a 2000+ user network, with nearly 750 attached devices (thin clients, fat clients, printers, etc).
I run an almost entirely Microsoft shop - 2000/2003/Exchange/XP/XPe, with Office 2003 / Encarta / Project as well. In terms of non-MS OS, take your pic from Debian, Thinstation and a host of Linux-based thin client devices (Neoware, Wyse, etc).
My Microsoft licensing costs come in at around £12,000 per year, this also includes my terminal service licensing. Is that a lot? Not really - the buy price for 650+ copies of XP, Office, plus CALs for Exchange, 2003 and Terminal Services is prohibatively high imho.
BECTA can complain about the terms of the agreement, and suggest we spend our money 'up front', but unless they are going to provide funding, I'm afraid to say I'll stick with the Schools Agreement for now.
I'd love to have the money to buy outright, don't get me wrong. But for a school with a relatively low income (ie our students come from a high socio-economic area) I simply can't afford to do it - £12,000 a year is however a manageable cost.
If the industry didn't do it, the Government would've done... the industry chose to do it's own dirty work.
How am I supposed to welcome our new microwave-photon overlords if they've already arrived?
Well, in that case the businesses concerned deserve everything they get for making a poor choice in hosting - be interesting the see what the status pages of the affected sites throw up as a reason when they come back up - and what steps those businesses will be taking to avoid the failures.
As a poster has commented elsewhere mind you, they could've (should've) enabled some kind of redundancy themselves with split-site hosting.
Losing a day's business might not affect a big corp, but would you keep your services at 365 after this?
I know I wouldn't; and I wouldn't want to keep my business with companies using 365 for their hosting either.
Yeah, I don't get those screenshots either - the RDP window is Vista, but the contents are XP... I'm willing to call bullshit on this as well - nothing more than anti-MS FUD without verification.
No no, don't give him ammunition... you'll just prove that all the games you played turned you into a gun-hording psycho!
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6539901.stm
2 hours from now and they'll have the airlocks released.
Who in their right minds decided to use 180 metres a second?
Call it 432mph and it'll make a lot more sense. (Calculation made roughly!)
That said, 432mph doesn't sound that fast to me. Ok, it is a helluva lot faster than storms here on earth, but I thought the majority of passenger jets travelled around the 500mph, which certainly makes it sound less impressive to me.
The first thing I do when I get a phone (and I'm always getting models a few months behind the curve to save a few £££s) is get it unlocked, and then I flash the firmware.
Orange (in the UK) are well known for branding their phones and removing features. Now I don't think we'll see this with the iPhone as Apple are unlikely to let telcos 'brand' the OS, but hooking directly into certain media streams is quite likely. It won't bother Joe Consumer, but I will certainly avoid anything that doesn't let me choose my own services.
... There isn't a cat in hells chance of the iPhone touching the iPods market.
Why?
Price for one. For $499 (with contract), you can get yourself a 4GB iPhone. For $349 you can get an 80GB iPod. That is a least expensive vs most expensive comparison.
The iPod (well, portable digital music player) market is huge; the numbers speak for themselves. People will happily pay a few hundred dollars for a portable player that'll last a few years. But $499 for a phone, plus contract? That is out of most peoples leagues for something that is completely unproven, if you ask me.
Sources for documentation from their main website;
http://zenoss.com/docs/zenwin - Windows documentation, rather brief. Supports 2003/XP apparently.
http://zenoss.com/docs - Main documentation website for Linux / BSD.
I guess the point is that we *should* be switching our machines off whenever possible as opposed to leaving them running for no reason. The home user isn't going to be persuaded by Linux if he/she has to wait a long time to actually get a computer into a usable state*.
;)
To be fair, my Windows box boots pretty quick; I think the time between power on and desktop is somewhere in the region of 50 seconds. The method of loading the core services - desktop - additional services at least gives the impression of speed, even through the disk continues to thrash for another 45 seconds as applications load in the background.
* Jokes about Windows never being usable even after booting can be inserted here as required!
Songs are being traded at a rate about 17 times the iTunes Store's recent rate of sales.
According to the article, this information is provided by BigChampagne LLC. According to their website blurb at http://www.bigchampagne.com/thedata.html ;
"Like it or not, the vast majority of online entertainment media is now acquired for free on P2P file sharing networks, and BigChampagne is there."
Cue lots of rubbish about network operation centres and live feed monitoring. Anyone want to throw out ideas about how they really monitor this stuff? Is there a way of downloading torrents with a client and finding out exact data transfers automatically?
I've heard of more likely things to be honest; but certainly combining a phish attempt with something like this isn't beyond the realms of impossibility. To offer my 2p, I called my bank once to change address and managed to guess my 'secret' password when the phone rep gave me a clue. To this day, I still don't remember what the secret originally was.
After wandering around the links, I came across the following website; http://www.oinfam0uso.moonfruit.com/
:)
And since they're charming people, I have no qualms about posting their method here;
Now you may be wondering HOW do we get your information? its easy, you call 18004myxbox pretend to be that person make up a story about how your little brother put in the information on the account and it was all fake, blah blah blah you might get one little piece of information per call but then you keep calling and keep calling everytime getting a little bit more information every time. once you have enough information you can get the Pasword on the windows live ID Reset, they may tell you they cant but its bull shit. people at bungie CAN and WILL reset your password. believe me
So, sounds like a classic social engineering scheme, as opposed to 'hacking the system'. Even so, you have to wonder if phone reps really are giving out information, even if it is a small amount. Anyone tried getting information out of the phone reps yet?
He downloaded material without bothering to make sure that what he was downloading was what he needed in order to play the music.
CDs and cassettes have been runaway successes in the past precisely because they avoided this kind of problem; you didn't need to 'research' anything to get what you wanted. You buy the CD, it works in any CD player. Of course various companies have got egg on their face when they tried to ignore the red book standards; hello Sony.
So a consumer assumed downloadable music would work the same way. A rather honest mistake in my eyes. I don't think the onus should be on consumers to research downloadable music, the players and the various formats.
As for his actions afterwards, well, that is a different matter. But I don't think anyone should be made to jump through hoops just to get an online content.
Normally, I'd agree.
But given that most airlines (at those in the UK) are freely dishing out our personal information to the US whenever we travel there, does this statement really hold true anymore?
Actually, that last sentance in your comment is quite interesting I think.
If it costs $1/gallon to ship water to a given location and the cost of water generated by the windmill device is $1.10/gallon, the windmill device is useless.
Since we're talking about the enviroment, and to do the run-around on my initial comment, there is the enviromental cost of transporting water any considerable distance. I can't think of anywhere off-hand, but there must be situations where water is transported instead of local water being used. A post further up mentions China as a prime example. The local water supply (ground based) is contaminated because of heavy industry. I'm certain throwing a few of these into remote villages would certainly make sense.