I thought the exact same thing. In the same store at checkout, depending on which credit card I use, I get asked for my zip code or I don't. American Express asks for billing zip code, while Visa doesn't. When my mother drove across country from LA, by the time she got to Chicago, she had to personally speak with the credit card company (American Express) to verify that her identity hadn't been stolen.
How many people actually know the zip codes around them? That's why it's the most reliable. My company moved three blocks in downtown Chicago to the other side of the river and went from a 6060* zip to a 6066* zip and we can literally see our old building. How likely is it an identity thief knows the victim's zip code off the top of his head?
I recently graduated from an Information Systems masters program. For the IS program, it was a requirement that we have a recent (i.e. Core 2 or better, wireless N, large HDDs, etc.). Digital note taking was encouraged, at least it felt like it was. Still, every class had some sort of laptop and attendance policy. Usually it was something along the lines of "every student will attend every lecture or face a letter grade deduction" and "laptop use is restricted to note taking only" or "laptops are not to be used in class".
Did people completely ignore the laptop rules? Absolutely. However, the program also mandated that every student be accessible to the program's administrative staff from 9-5 Monday through Friday and either Saturday or Sunday (mostly for interview scheduling). Since it is easier to track down someone by cell phone or instant messenger, everyone needed their laptops and cell phones on at all times.
Yet these same administrative staff were also professors. Most of whom prohibited laptop use in class! Combine all of this with the fact that lectures were posted online after class, and the only real incentive to show up is for participation. Sometimes this was important because the lecture material didn't adequately prepare for exams. Other times, not so much.
To the article's point about "it's my education and I can do with it what I want", there's plenty of truth in that. After all, you don't have to be in college. Still, the retort that it devalues the education of everyone else is also slightly off the mark. It should be obvious to an interviewer or anyone else you come in contact with whether you know what you're talking about or not, regardless of where you went to school. That comes from actually learning the material and not from sitting in a lecture that you're forced to attend. This is why a lot of times I felt that professors who simply taught straight from the book or put all the information in the slides were simply wasting my time by forcing me to attend. If you're prepared for class and the professor doesn't add any real value, then laptop laziness will continue to be a problem. I think we're mistaking the symptom for the disease: namely being prepared for class and having a value-added lecturer.
I'm not trying to troll, but you're comparing teaching an Intro to Computing course, which is presumably for underclassmen, to teaching a Strategic Management capstone course?!? The lower level courses in colleges are where the poorest/newest professors tend to be. It should be quite obvious that a required course for non-majors would result in a less interested student body because they could care less about the subject matter. The upperclassmen, however, should be engaged because they (presumably) have a large selection of courses to choose from and found one they're in interesting/useful/whatever. Teaching lower level courses is usually intended to weed out weak teachers who can't maintain the expected GPA. It's entirely possible that you would still be teaching if you had been moved up to classes only for CS majors. Sadly, many good teachers are stuck in this purgatory because of tenure and other asinine policies that allow outmoded professors to continue teaching a Software Engineering course with overhead slides and printed reports.
I agree with you. Also, I think I need to add to that the carriers the new WP7 phones came out on: AT&T and T-Mobile. AT&T has the iPhone and T-Mobile has the MyTouch 4G as their flagship phones. Moreover, until there are as many WP7 phone models as there are Android models, you can't really make a comparison between X number of total Android phones sold and Y number of total WP7 phones sold. That's apples and oranges. If you chose the same number of Android and WP7 phones and then compared their sales, I would guess that they'll be closer than the bogus numbers reported in the summary, especially since every major carrier has at least one Android phone and most have double digits.
I also think comparisons to the iPhone are overrated too. Yes, the comparison will be made, but Apple has really put all its eggs in one basket on purpose, while Microsoft, Blackberry, and Google have diversified their lineups and a single phone from any of those lineups is not designed to be all things to all people. So the fairness of the comparison is at least debatable. On top of that Apple was essentially first to the game and now has a huge base locked into their product and its easier to continue your wireless phone contract than break it and much easier to stick with the same smartphone OS. Which is at least part of the reason we see such "huge" iPhone sales every time a new one is released
Back in the day (2004-2006), when Facebook was only for college students, email addresses on Facebook used to be mailto: links. Since crossing the collegiate network boundaries was more difficult than it is now (Facebook hadn't eroded basic privacy that far yet), having a person's email was a surefire way to make sure you found who you were looking for.
Once Facebook opened up to non-college students, I believe emails displayed on Facebook actually became images to harden them from harvesting by spam bots. This was before "granular" privacy controls, and so anyone who was your "friend" on Facebook could see your basic information, of which your email was a part.
Once Facebook was forced to introduce stricter/"easier" privacy controls, a user could restrict, on an per-individual basis, who could see their email(s). As a result, emails became text.
In regards to allowing exporting other users' information, I think Facebook would face a huge backlash from users and "game" developers, for different, though obvious reasons. However, the biggest reason this won't happen is because Facebook's goal is to hoard users' information by providing low barriers to entry and high barriers to exit.
This article was written two days ago! Dell and 3PAR both confirmed that as part of Dell's original merger agreement (and each successive agreement) Dell has the option to simply match any competing bids. This has hardly been settled, which you'd see if you RTFA.
Hey! I was on the team in '07. My area of expertise was parallelizing POV-Ray and I rushed to the center Tuesday morning when the power failed to reconstruct our POV-Ray run. If only our system ran as well as it looked. Stupid Apple xServes took up 4A per server. Probably why we went with IBM on '08 FTW!
I don't have links to results, but I was there for the first one and helped implement the second one. Prices are compiled by the teams but usually not in the press releases
2007: University of Alberta with an SGI system
2008: Indiana University/Technische Universität Dresden running an IBM Bladecenter
My guess is systems usually run in the $100K to $150K range. The fastest system in 2007 was from Tiawan made by Asus with prototype 45nm Xeons (released the day before the competition).
If you can reconstruct the applications you have to run (which are different every year) to run efficiently on the GPUs. Sometimes it takes months just to get them to compile on your configuration (think software written in FORTRAN70 by a non-Computer Scientist).
Your 36 Pico-ITX's wouldn't qualify. Teams are paired with vendors and some schools are paired together, for instance my university was paired with Technische Universität Dresden in 2008. You're allowed to customize, within reason, what comes in your server, but usually it's a system put together by the vendor and not purchased by the university because that's a considerable investment for a system that isn't anywhere near as powerful as current Top500 systems.
For example, in 2007, we had 9 Apple xServes connected by Myrinet 10G over 10Gig-E. I don't want to get into how power hungry or poor performing they were, but that system was completely provided by Apple and Myricom, but those 9 servers and that switch had a list price north of $100,000. The hardware was beautiful, but it didn't perform like the jet engine it looked and sounded like.
Once again, the point is to demonstrate that even undergraduates, who don't have a lot of experience or exposure to HPC, can construct and operate a small cluster. My guess is the cost of hardware isn't part of the contest because the hardware is provided by the vendor as a promotional expense and then returned to the vendor after the competition, costing the institutions very little.
Moreover, all hardware must be in production and unmodified
That's an odd requirement. IMO a team that could design and build their own hardware that's more efficient than off the shelf hardware should be encouraged to do so.
True, but the point of the competition isn't to show off the vendor, or even the hardware; it's to show off how easy it is for undergraduate students, using commodity hardware, to construct and run a cluster that has more computing power than the fastest supercomputers from a decade ago at a fraction of the TCO.
The point of the "unmodified, in production" simply means that you have to use off-the-shelf equipment. As the organizers put it, if someone wanted to walk up and buy your cluster, or an exact copy, they should be able to.
You're right that it's hard to fill a full rack, even with 4U servers that use 120mm fans, but I believe Stony Brook came the closest because they were using ULV Xeons. They had 16 servers I think and each was 4U
As far as fun, it was incredible and very stressful
Having participated in the first of the Student Cluster Challenges at SC07 when I was still in undergrad, I can attest that there's far more to this than what the summary lets on. Not only are you limited to 26 Amps, which is the significant limiting factor, but you're located on the show floor and running your system for 36 hours straight in front of the conference attendees. Moreover, all hardware must be in production and unmodified and fit within a single rack. The Taiwanese team lucked out in this regard as they were using the (then new) 45nm Intel Xeons that were announced the day before the competition started. The only thing you can modify is the code for the programs you have to run (except for the HPC benchmarks).
Some of you might be thinking "pfff...I can stay awake for 36 hours, no problem". That's true, but you're not allowed to be in your booth for more than 12 hours straight and after you leave you must take an 8 hour break. Furthermore, the machines are firewalled from all incoming connections and do not share the same internet connection that the rest of the conference uses.
At SC07, there was a significant power failure on the second day of the competition which brought most teams to their knees. The applications we were running (GAMESS, POP, POV-RAY) are not designed to pick up from a power failure. While the Taiwanese had by far the most powerful system, they couldn't recover from the power failure that had corrupted their SAN in time to win.
To your point, I'm not sure you could get 158 Atoms in a set of off-the-shelf servers that would fit in a single rack to equal a cluster running the latest E series Xeons that perform at top clock but have a lower TDP.
Call me back when they fix the depth of field issue. The whole scene needs to be in focus so that when my eyes aren't looking at precisely what the director wants, my eyes don't try to focus on something that can't be focused on.
Unfortunately, I'm not sure if optical technology is capable of this. Each "eye" of a 3D camera has to focus on something by its very nature. Where this doesn't apply is with CGI. The only movie I've ever seen in 3D was Toy Story 3. While it wasn't worth the extra cost to see the 3D, 3D meant everything was in focus so you could look anywhere on screen and not just where the director wanted you to look.
I agree, but my first thought was that Microsoft produces more software than Google and Mozilla combined, which creates a much larger footprint for vulnerability. This, combined with the fact that some of their software is supported for up to 13 years after it's released (Windows XP), means that it very well would cost them a fortune. And by the time they stop supporting their software, attacks which never existed in anyone's wildest wet dreams have appeared, and the 12-year-old software wasn't designed and can't be significantly rearchitected to handle such attacks. A few examples that come to mind are Windows XP and ASLR or IE 6 and ActiveX.
I also think your point that Microsoft wants people doing this for the right reasons holds significant water. Paying someone a bounty provides the wrong motivation because, instead of Microsoft and the researcher being aligned in a common goal to make software safer, the researcher and Microsoft sit at opposite ends of the table because one side wants to maximize, while the other side wants to minimize, the bounty. If the researcher goes in knowing they aren't going to get paid then there's less incentive for viewing Microsoft as a rich organization to be fleeced and more incentive to work together. Unfortunately, it seems that the researchers think they hold more cards than they do and want to get paid a bounty because "everyone else does" and it would be easy money.
As others have asked thousands of times before when random people have screamed "Monopoly!" about Apple: What, Fucking, Monopoly?
Apple Monopolies:
MP3 players?
Distribution of iPhone OS Apps?
Operating Systems on Apple hardware?
Microsoft didn't have a monopoly on browsers running on *nix when they were hit with antitrust violations for Internet Explorer on Windows. It was specifically the Windows browser market. Monopolies have very little to do with overall market share, especially when you've overly broadened the market they must monopolize to something incredibly general like "mobile devices". Why can Apple force the choice of NO FLASH on its users? Antitrust is about keeping companies from setting the rules for the game and playing the game at the same time, which is exactly what Apple is doing.
You might argue that no one is forcing the user to buy an Apple iWhatever, but there are tons of apps that don't run on another "mobile device" that do run on Apple gear. If the user wants a specific iPhone OS only app, then they must purchase a device with that OS. If they also want another app and the app developer wants to create an app for that device, how can a third party legally prohibit that?
In what way is Adobe "bullying their way into a market" here? Closed systems aren't illegal, but once you hold a monopoly in a market and start deciding that only certain other people can play with you it's a different story. Adobe is being vilified by Apple, and whether that's true or not cannot preclude Adobe from the right to create products that work on iPhone OS. If others can do it, Adobe should be able to too. Apple holds a monopoly in the MP3 player market. They also hold a monopoly on the distribution of iPod Touch, iPad, and iPhone applications.
I'm glad that someone with a little bit of pocket change is going after Apple and their vendor lock in. In my opinion, that's far worse than a closed source product. At least then, people can choose not to create sites with Flash voluntarily instead of being forced to.
My institution, Indiana University, has already contracted our student email services out. We actually have two systems: Imail (hosted by Microsoft on Windows Live) and Umail (hosted by Google on Gmail). Both of these are the ad-free versions and you have to use a secure University URL to log in to them (i.e. you can't just use gmail.com). Furthermore, the Global Address List from Active Directory are available inside these services as well. We've always been on the cutting edge of technology use though, and my guess is that these systems are FERPA compliant because UITS is big on CTA. After all, you have the option of forwarding your emails outside of the university anyway.
After your time at the university is over, your account automatically reverts to an ad-supported version, but you don't lose your email address. Something important to note, however, is that faculty and staff are not permitted to use the external systems and instead must use the in-house Exchange or Webmail services.
If the only thing keeping them from upgrading was a "small consumer grade server" I'm pretty sure the NSA would have made one fall off the back of a truck and this would no longer be a problem.
The problem is more likely that the software running on the server is proprietary and closed-source, making upgrades incredibly expensive. Far more expensive than the incremental upgrades that the system should have seen in the 20+ years that it's been in production.
I attend a major university that uses PHP and MySQL as their main server tools. The MySQL database that's provided with the hosting account is a "customized" version of MySQL 5.0 that does not allow stored procedures. The functionality is simply not there. This means that every query has to be dynamically generated (in a sense). I hate it because I'm losing serious performance and I end up with sometimes massive queries because I can't offload them to a stored procedure. In this case, my only true recourse is to use escape strings and type checking. I wouldn't be "stuck in the 'old PHP' ways" if I could help it.
Slashdot Mirror
Zip code happens to be one of the most reliable.
I thought the exact same thing. In the same store at checkout, depending on which credit card I use, I get asked for my zip code or I don't. American Express asks for billing zip code, while Visa doesn't. When my mother drove across country from LA, by the time she got to Chicago, she had to personally speak with the credit card company (American Express) to verify that her identity hadn't been stolen.
How many people actually know the zip codes around them? That's why it's the most reliable. My company moved three blocks in downtown Chicago to the other side of the river and went from a 6060* zip to a 6066* zip and we can literally see our old building. How likely is it an identity thief knows the victim's zip code off the top of his head?
Interesting. My first result on Bing was: this. Google, however, was useless.
I recently graduated from an Information Systems masters program. For the IS program, it was a requirement that we have a recent (i.e. Core 2 or better, wireless N, large HDDs, etc.). Digital note taking was encouraged, at least it felt like it was. Still, every class had some sort of laptop and attendance policy. Usually it was something along the lines of "every student will attend every lecture or face a letter grade deduction" and "laptop use is restricted to note taking only" or "laptops are not to be used in class".
Did people completely ignore the laptop rules? Absolutely. However, the program also mandated that every student be accessible to the program's administrative staff from 9-5 Monday through Friday and either Saturday or Sunday (mostly for interview scheduling). Since it is easier to track down someone by cell phone or instant messenger, everyone needed their laptops and cell phones on at all times.
Yet these same administrative staff were also professors. Most of whom prohibited laptop use in class! Combine all of this with the fact that lectures were posted online after class, and the only real incentive to show up is for participation. Sometimes this was important because the lecture material didn't adequately prepare for exams. Other times, not so much.
To the article's point about "it's my education and I can do with it what I want", there's plenty of truth in that. After all, you don't have to be in college. Still, the retort that it devalues the education of everyone else is also slightly off the mark. It should be obvious to an interviewer or anyone else you come in contact with whether you know what you're talking about or not, regardless of where you went to school. That comes from actually learning the material and not from sitting in a lecture that you're forced to attend. This is why a lot of times I felt that professors who simply taught straight from the book or put all the information in the slides were simply wasting my time by forcing me to attend. If you're prepared for class and the professor doesn't add any real value, then laptop laziness will continue to be a problem. I think we're mistaking the symptom for the disease: namely being prepared for class and having a value-added lecturer.
Lucy Asks Charlie Brown to Kick Football...Again
I'm not trying to troll, but you're comparing teaching an Intro to Computing course, which is presumably for underclassmen, to teaching a Strategic Management capstone course?!? The lower level courses in colleges are where the poorest/newest professors tend to be. It should be quite obvious that a required course for non-majors would result in a less interested student body because they could care less about the subject matter. The upperclassmen, however, should be engaged because they (presumably) have a large selection of courses to choose from and found one they're in interesting/useful/whatever. Teaching lower level courses is usually intended to weed out weak teachers who can't maintain the expected GPA. It's entirely possible that you would still be teaching if you had been moved up to classes only for CS majors. Sadly, many good teachers are stuck in this purgatory because of tenure and other asinine policies that allow outmoded professors to continue teaching a Software Engineering course with overhead slides and printed reports.
I agree with you. Also, I think I need to add to that the carriers the new WP7 phones came out on: AT&T and T-Mobile. AT&T has the iPhone and T-Mobile has the MyTouch 4G as their flagship phones. Moreover, until there are as many WP7 phone models as there are Android models, you can't really make a comparison between X number of total Android phones sold and Y number of total WP7 phones sold. That's apples and oranges. If you chose the same number of Android and WP7 phones and then compared their sales, I would guess that they'll be closer than the bogus numbers reported in the summary, especially since every major carrier has at least one Android phone and most have double digits.
I also think comparisons to the iPhone are overrated too. Yes, the comparison will be made, but Apple has really put all its eggs in one basket on purpose, while Microsoft, Blackberry, and Google have diversified their lineups and a single phone from any of those lineups is not designed to be all things to all people. So the fairness of the comparison is at least debatable. On top of that Apple was essentially first to the game and now has a huge base locked into their product and its easier to continue your wireless phone contract than break it and much easier to stick with the same smartphone OS. Which is at least part of the reason we see such "huge" iPhone sales every time a new one is released
Back in the day (2004-2006), when Facebook was only for college students, email addresses on Facebook used to be mailto: links. Since crossing the collegiate network boundaries was more difficult than it is now (Facebook hadn't eroded basic privacy that far yet), having a person's email was a surefire way to make sure you found who you were looking for.
Once Facebook opened up to non-college students, I believe emails displayed on Facebook actually became images to harden them from harvesting by spam bots. This was before "granular" privacy controls, and so anyone who was your "friend" on Facebook could see your basic information, of which your email was a part.
Once Facebook was forced to introduce stricter/"easier" privacy controls, a user could restrict, on an per-individual basis, who could see their email(s). As a result, emails became text.
In regards to allowing exporting other users' information, I think Facebook would face a huge backlash from users and "game" developers, for different, though obvious reasons. However, the biggest reason this won't happen is because Facebook's goal is to hoard users' information by providing low barriers to entry and high barriers to exit.
This article was written two days ago! Dell and 3PAR both confirmed that as part of Dell's original merger agreement (and each successive agreement) Dell has the option to simply match any competing bids. This has hardly been settled, which you'd see if you RTFA.
Hey! I was on the team in '07. My area of expertise was parallelizing POV-Ray and I rushed to the center Tuesday morning when the power failed to reconstruct our POV-Ray run. If only our system ran as well as it looked. Stupid Apple xServes took up 4A per server. Probably why we went with IBM on '08 FTW!
I don't have links to results, but I was there for the first one and helped implement the second one. Prices are compiled by the teams but usually not in the press releases
My guess is systems usually run in the $100K to $150K range. The fastest system in 2007 was from Tiawan made by Asus with prototype 45nm Xeons (released the day before the competition).
If you can reconstruct the applications you have to run (which are different every year) to run efficiently on the GPUs. Sometimes it takes months just to get them to compile on your configuration (think software written in FORTRAN70 by a non-Computer Scientist).
Your 36 Pico-ITX's wouldn't qualify. Teams are paired with vendors and some schools are paired together, for instance my university was paired with Technische Universität Dresden in 2008. You're allowed to customize, within reason, what comes in your server, but usually it's a system put together by the vendor and not purchased by the university because that's a considerable investment for a system that isn't anywhere near as powerful as current Top500 systems.
For example, in 2007, we had 9 Apple xServes connected by Myrinet 10G over 10Gig-E. I don't want to get into how power hungry or poor performing they were, but that system was completely provided by Apple and Myricom, but those 9 servers and that switch had a list price north of $100,000. The hardware was beautiful, but it didn't perform like the jet engine it looked and sounded like.
Once again, the point is to demonstrate that even undergraduates, who don't have a lot of experience or exposure to HPC, can construct and operate a small cluster. My guess is the cost of hardware isn't part of the contest because the hardware is provided by the vendor as a promotional expense and then returned to the vendor after the competition, costing the institutions very little.
Moreover, all hardware must be in production and unmodified
That's an odd requirement. IMO a team that could design and build their own hardware that's more efficient than off the shelf hardware should be encouraged to do so.
True, but the point of the competition isn't to show off the vendor, or even the hardware; it's to show off how easy it is for undergraduate students, using commodity hardware, to construct and run a cluster that has more computing power than the fastest supercomputers from a decade ago at a fraction of the TCO.
The point of the "unmodified, in production" simply means that you have to use off-the-shelf equipment. As the organizers put it, if someone wanted to walk up and buy your cluster, or an exact copy, they should be able to.
You're right that it's hard to fill a full rack, even with 4U servers that use 120mm fans, but I believe Stony Brook came the closest because they were using ULV Xeons. They had 16 servers I think and each was 4U
As far as fun, it was incredible and very stressful
Having participated in the first of the Student Cluster Challenges at SC07 when I was still in undergrad, I can attest that there's far more to this than what the summary lets on. Not only are you limited to 26 Amps, which is the significant limiting factor, but you're located on the show floor and running your system for 36 hours straight in front of the conference attendees. Moreover, all hardware must be in production and unmodified and fit within a single rack. The Taiwanese team lucked out in this regard as they were using the (then new) 45nm Intel Xeons that were announced the day before the competition started. The only thing you can modify is the code for the programs you have to run (except for the HPC benchmarks).
Some of you might be thinking "pfff...I can stay awake for 36 hours, no problem". That's true, but you're not allowed to be in your booth for more than 12 hours straight and after you leave you must take an 8 hour break. Furthermore, the machines are firewalled from all incoming connections and do not share the same internet connection that the rest of the conference uses.
At SC07, there was a significant power failure on the second day of the competition which brought most teams to their knees. The applications we were running (GAMESS, POP, POV-RAY) are not designed to pick up from a power failure. While the Taiwanese had by far the most powerful system, they couldn't recover from the power failure that had corrupted their SAN in time to win.
To your point, I'm not sure you could get 158 Atoms in a set of off-the-shelf servers that would fit in a single rack to equal a cluster running the latest E series Xeons that perform at top clock but have a lower TDP.
Too bad this is an entitlement generation who don't feel they should face any consequences for their actions.
Call me back when they fix the depth of field issue. The whole scene needs to be in focus so that when my eyes aren't looking at precisely what the director wants, my eyes don't try to focus on something that can't be focused on.
Unfortunately, I'm not sure if optical technology is capable of this. Each "eye" of a 3D camera has to focus on something by its very nature. Where this doesn't apply is with CGI. The only movie I've ever seen in 3D was Toy Story 3. While it wasn't worth the extra cost to see the 3D, 3D meant everything was in focus so you could look anywhere on screen and not just where the director wanted you to look.
I agree, but my first thought was that Microsoft produces more software than Google and Mozilla combined, which creates a much larger footprint for vulnerability. This, combined with the fact that some of their software is supported for up to 13 years after it's released (Windows XP), means that it very well would cost them a fortune. And by the time they stop supporting their software, attacks which never existed in anyone's wildest wet dreams have appeared, and the 12-year-old software wasn't designed and can't be significantly rearchitected to handle such attacks. A few examples that come to mind are Windows XP and ASLR or IE 6 and ActiveX.
I also think your point that Microsoft wants people doing this for the right reasons holds significant water. Paying someone a bounty provides the wrong motivation because, instead of Microsoft and the researcher being aligned in a common goal to make software safer, the researcher and Microsoft sit at opposite ends of the table because one side wants to maximize, while the other side wants to minimize, the bounty. If the researcher goes in knowing they aren't going to get paid then there's less incentive for viewing Microsoft as a rich organization to be fleeced and more incentive to work together. Unfortunately, it seems that the researchers think they hold more cards than they do and want to get paid a bounty because "everyone else does" and it would be easy money.
Apparently denial isn't just a river in Africa.
As others have asked thousands of times before when random people have screamed "Monopoly!" about Apple: What, Fucking, Monopoly?
Apple Monopolies:
Microsoft didn't have a monopoly on browsers running on *nix when they were hit with antitrust violations for Internet Explorer on Windows. It was specifically the Windows browser market. Monopolies have very little to do with overall market share, especially when you've overly broadened the market they must monopolize to something incredibly general like "mobile devices". Why can Apple force the choice of NO FLASH on its users? Antitrust is about keeping companies from setting the rules for the game and playing the game at the same time, which is exactly what Apple is doing.
You might argue that no one is forcing the user to buy an Apple iWhatever, but there are tons of apps that don't run on another "mobile device" that do run on Apple gear. If the user wants a specific iPhone OS only app, then they must purchase a device with that OS. If they also want another app and the app developer wants to create an app for that device, how can a third party legally prohibit that?
In what way is Adobe "bullying their way into a market" here? Closed systems aren't illegal, but once you hold a monopoly in a market and start deciding that only certain other people can play with you it's a different story. Adobe is being vilified by Apple, and whether that's true or not cannot preclude Adobe from the right to create products that work on iPhone OS. If others can do it, Adobe should be able to too. Apple holds a monopoly in the MP3 player market. They also hold a monopoly on the distribution of iPod Touch, iPad, and iPhone applications.
I'm glad that someone with a little bit of pocket change is going after Apple and their vendor lock in. In my opinion, that's far worse than a closed source product. At least then, people can choose not to create sites with Flash voluntarily instead of being forced to.
My institution, Indiana University, has already contracted our student email services out. We actually have two systems: Imail (hosted by Microsoft on Windows Live) and Umail (hosted by Google on Gmail). Both of these are the ad-free versions and you have to use a secure University URL to log in to them (i.e. you can't just use gmail.com). Furthermore, the Global Address List from Active Directory are available inside these services as well. We've always been on the cutting edge of technology use though, and my guess is that these systems are FERPA compliant because UITS is big on CTA. After all, you have the option of forwarding your emails outside of the university anyway.
After your time at the university is over, your account automatically reverts to an ad-supported version, but you don't lose your email address. Something important to note, however, is that faculty and staff are not permitted to use the external systems and instead must use the in-house Exchange or Webmail services.
If the only thing keeping them from upgrading was a "small consumer grade server" I'm pretty sure the NSA would have made one fall off the back of a truck and this would no longer be a problem.
The problem is more likely that the software running on the server is proprietary and closed-source, making upgrades incredibly expensive. Far more expensive than the incremental upgrades that the system should have seen in the 20+ years that it's been in production.
I attend a major university that uses PHP and MySQL as their main server tools. The MySQL database that's provided with the hosting account is a "customized" version of MySQL 5.0 that does not allow stored procedures. The functionality is simply not there. This means that every query has to be dynamically generated (in a sense). I hate it because I'm losing serious performance and I end up with sometimes massive queries because I can't offload them to a stored procedure. In this case, my only true recourse is to use escape strings and type checking. I wouldn't be "stuck in the 'old PHP' ways" if I could help it.
Something else for AT&T to blame for overwhelming its network...?
Plus since there are no contracts, AT&T can raise the price every month if they want