Hell to the no. At my previous job, we switched from hosted e-mail to GAFE (Google Apps for Education) after a few years there. It was the happiest day of my 10-year IT career. The amount of time I spend on "Where'd my mystery e-mail go?", blacklists, patching, spam management, etc, was tedious and frustrating. Goodbye, spamhaus. It is VERY easy to screw up managing an e-mail server. Open relay, anyone?
I agree with the above two, this is freaking out over nothing. It makes logical sense that if I've like or followed my lender of Facebook, I'm more inclined to pay back my loans. It's just simply acknowledging that engagement is correlated with successful payments. Not really seeing an issue here.
I hope Hulu doesn't loose it's current 5-prior-episode model. I, um, know friends who used to torrent all the recent episodes because sitting down at exactly 8pm every night did not work. However, with Hulu (and Netlflix), we're now legally watching all of our television. I hope Big Media doesn't kill this golden goose, or else you'll have an entire generation that was raised on Napster go back to piracy. And has been stated here more than once, it's not a matter if piracy's legality, but rather it's simplicity. Netflix + Hulu = easy access and affordable without too many hoops to jump through. Add more hoops, and piracy becomes the easy choice.
While I agree in premise the bullying off-campus is just that an should not be disciplined on-campus, it's not always as easy as that. One of the major issues we run into is cyber bullying almost always carries over into the classroom. Then, the student comes us to these with these issues. Yes, part of the cyber bullying is off campus, but when they life is also miserable at school as a consequence, does that become something we need to worry about?
The other reality is that is a kid is being bullied off-campus, they're more than likely also being bullied at school.
Regarding getting around filters. yea, I know about SSH. There are also plenty of ways for me to block that. For instance, on FF, I can change the configuration to disallow access to Network options and use Active Directory prevent changes to IE while preventing running other programs, including Portable Apps. And while I don't spend my time filtering through all the logs, it is fairly obvious when every single piece of traffic from a host goes through one IP address that something funny's going on. Plus, there are remote desktop resources to allow me to see your screen and when I see access to Facebook, again, it's fairly obvious something amiss is up.
I do realize there are always new ways around the filter, which I need to discover and figure out. Also, I think ya'll vastly overestimate the actual technical prowess of most students. Mention the words SSH, VPN, or Proxy and you'll just draw a blank stare from most people.
And FWIW, straight from Google's own blog regarding this subject:
"We recently launched a beta version of encrypted (SSL) search at https://www.google.com to prevent people from intercepting our user's search terms and results. However, because encrypted search creates an obscured channel between a user's computer and Google, users who go to https://www.google.com can bypass some school's content filters. This can make it hard for schools to stop students from accessing adult content."
Working in a school as a sysadmin, this isn't about spying to me. I don't sit there looking at firewall logs of every search entry visited. Rather, the crux of the issue is the ability for content filters to work properly. With normal web queries, our web proxies can properly filter content (the concept of filtering in the first place is a completely separate argument). On the other hand, with https search, our web filter can no longer see the searches and properly filter inappropriate material as effectively (unless I install our own certificate authority, effectively performing a man in the middle attack).
You love to post about free, and I found the "about me" section interesting:
"I've looked at other woodworking sites. Furniture plans are usually expensive. Why give yours away?
Would you look at my plans if you had to first buy them?"
She doesn't appear to have any formal business training, and realizes the opportunity cost of charging for plans- not many people will buy them. Granted, she may not be monetizing much off offering the plan for free, but eh.
I work in a 1:1 mac laptop school and it's clearly written in the AUP that there is no expectation of privacy on the laptops. They are the school's laptops- not the students. I use ARD to monitor what students are doing, and I don't feel bad about it at all.
That said, the idea of leaving photo booth on 24/7, particularly when they're at home, is very squeezy to me and I would not do that.
Not really surprising. I work in IT at a school some teachers have commented that it's easier to just let students play online games in study halls because at least they stop visiting with neighbors and stop causing disruptions.
Perhaps the US needs to invoke copyright over the American Flag and demand royalties, retroactive for the past couple hundred years. Helluva way to pay off the debt!
While I won't be paying for the NYT anytime soon, I think this is more of a push for charging on devices such as the iPhone, the Kindle, and the fabled Tablet. As more and more closed devices come out, it allows the Times to create partnerships with the device companies to create a built-in paywall. IF the tablet and other portable devices do take off, then the gamble could work. I'm thinking of how the iPod and iTunes helped the music industry to monetize music in the digital age- perhaps the newspaper industry is hoping for the same thing.
I'm guessing people who actually pay Google (e.g. for Google Apps) get better support.
http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/features.html
FWIW, my school's a customer of Google Apps for education- virtually identical to business apps, except we get it free. We actually do get decent service and I've been able to get a real, live human being on the phone occasionally. Granted, they always have to pass me on to another department who might or might not call me back a few days later, but I've definitely dealt with worse paid tech support.
I think Steve's idea is that it's not completely free since you had to buy a Windows license in the first place to get the software. His point is that core components like Windows won't be free any time soon. It's like IE or Windows Media Player- it's another reason to pay for a product (the OS) instead of Mac/Linux.
Did you read the second part of my statement? Let me elaborate:
In schools I've dealt with, the assumption is one, and two if you're lucky, do the scheduling all on computers. This tends to start out as a highly automated process. I tell the computer how many of each class to have per semester and how many students per class. I give scheduling and request priorities. As far as actually building a master schedule, the technique for doing so is lost on us who tell the computer to do it. Whereas in the past, more than one person would word on schedules and they knew and utilized techniques to build a schedule from scratch.
Building schedules also takes a lot of time. Having done it for the past few years, I know when I need to start to make the magic happen. Now, if the entire system goes down and I'm unable to do scheduling (that's the real problem, IMHO- the system not working and not having some way to connect to the database), I'm in a very bad position because the school relies solely on me, who was never trained in the formal art of schedule making, to make schedules.
It is worth noting a lot of schools function under the same premise because scheduling software tends to be complicated, and most administrators get completely lost. Inevitably, the only people able to actually use the database software are the IT people. So, guess who gets to make the schedules? Your friendly IT staff!
I do scheduling for a high school, and doing it without a computer is damn near impossible, in part due to training. I was never trained how to- I just have the student database program do its magic and create a schedules based on parameters I set up. Afterward, I go in and tweak it.
But, if I had to schedule an entire high school on pen and pencil? I wouldn't even know where to start. And telling kids to just "go to their class they signed up for" is a very good recipe for disaster. And this is at a school 170 students. The thought of scheduling 4000 students by hand when you plan on doing it by computer? Good luck.
Yea, I think implementing personal finance into the HS cirriculum is a very good idea. Countless students in college didn't know how to balance checkbooks, why having 8 credit cards maxed out, etc, is a bad idea.
On some levels, it may be up to the parents to educate their kids about personal issues- I was lucky enough to have parents who did so. But what about those whose parents who don't care or have crappy personal financial skills? Does that mean those kids just get the shaft because their parents dropped the ball?
And I agree with the other comment about forgetting high school traditional economics ideas. Hell, the college I went to, econ was a required course for all college students, leaving the door open for HS to gear economics more towards personal finance.
I pretty much agree with this. I don't buy movies because I only watch them once, and am not a fan of Netflix because I'm very much an impulse watcher- watch one movie a month sometimes and watch a movie nightly some months. Redbox afford me the flexibility to watch movies on my terms at a reasonable price with a decent selection. I won't be pirating, but without redbox, the movie industry also won't be getting my money.
just no
Hell to the no. At my previous job, we switched from hosted e-mail to GAFE (Google Apps for Education) after a few years there. It was the happiest day of my 10-year IT career. The amount of time I spend on "Where'd my mystery e-mail go?", blacklists, patching, spam management, etc, was tedious and frustrating. Goodbye, spamhaus. It is VERY easy to screw up managing an e-mail server. Open relay, anyone?
I agree with the above two, this is freaking out over nothing. It makes logical sense that if I've like or followed my lender of Facebook, I'm more inclined to pay back my loans. It's just simply acknowledging that engagement is correlated with successful payments. Not really seeing an issue here.
Hope it doesn't go anywhere
I hope Hulu doesn't loose it's current 5-prior-episode model. I, um, know friends who used to torrent all the recent episodes because sitting down at exactly 8pm every night did not work. However, with Hulu (and Netlflix), we're now legally watching all of our television. I hope Big Media doesn't kill this golden goose, or else you'll have an entire generation that was raised on Napster go back to piracy. And has been stated here more than once, it's not a matter if piracy's legality, but rather it's simplicity. Netflix + Hulu = easy access and affordable without too many hoops to jump through. Add more hoops, and piracy becomes the easy choice.
cyber bullying
While I agree in premise the bullying off-campus is just that an should not be disciplined on-campus, it's not always as easy as that. One of the major issues we run into is cyber bullying almost always carries over into the classroom. Then, the student comes us to these with these issues. Yes, part of the cyber bullying is off campus, but when they life is also miserable at school as a consequence, does that become something we need to worry about?
The other reality is that is a kid is being bullied off-campus, they're more than likely also being bullied at school.
SSH
Regarding getting around filters. yea, I know about SSH. There are also plenty of ways for me to block that. For instance, on FF, I can change the configuration to disallow access to Network options and use Active Directory prevent changes to IE while preventing running other programs, including Portable Apps. And while I don't spend my time filtering through all the logs, it is fairly obvious when every single piece of traffic from a host goes through one IP address that something funny's going on. Plus, there are remote desktop resources to allow me to see your screen and when I see access to Facebook, again, it's fairly obvious something amiss is up.
I do realize there are always new ways around the filter, which I need to discover and figure out. Also, I think ya'll vastly overestimate the actual technical prowess of most students. Mention the words SSH, VPN, or Proxy and you'll just draw a blank stare from most people.
And FWIW, straight from Google's own blog regarding this subject: "We recently launched a beta version of encrypted (SSL) search at https://www.google.com to prevent people from intercepting our user's search terms and results. However, because encrypted search creates an obscured channel between a user's computer and Google, users who go to https://www.google.com can bypass some school's content filters. This can make it hard for schools to stop students from accessing adult content."
Spying vs filtering
Working in a school as a sysadmin, this isn't about spying to me. I don't sit there looking at firewall logs of every search entry visited. Rather, the crux of the issue is the ability for content filters to work properly. With normal web queries, our web proxies can properly filter content (the concept of filtering in the first place is a completely separate argument). On the other hand, with https search, our web filter can no longer see the searches and properly filter inappropriate material as effectively (unless I install our own certificate authority, effectively performing a man in the middle attack).
Re:
It's because administrators- I am one in a Mac school- take measures to prevent this.
it sure wouldn't at my house in high school. i would have had linux on it before i even got off the bus :)
Heh, too bad the same software that takes pictures can easily run automated linux scripts to check for that exact thing.
Free plans
You love to post about free, and I found the "about me" section interesting:
"I've looked at other woodworking sites. Furniture plans are usually expensive. Why give yours away?
Would you look at my plans if you had to first buy them?"
She doesn't appear to have any formal business training, and realizes the opportunity cost of charging for plans- not many people will buy them. Granted, she may not be monetizing much off offering the plan for free, but eh.
Re: Re: Re: To disable Apple Remote Desktop client software:
That's what the Open Firmware Password utility is for.
Remote Desktop
I work in a 1:1 mac laptop school and it's clearly written in the AUP that there is no expectation of privacy on the laptops. They are the school's laptops- not the students. I use ARD to monitor what students are doing, and I don't feel bad about it at all.
That said, the idea of leaving photo booth on 24/7, particularly when they're at home, is very squeezy to me and I would not do that.
not surprising
Not really surprising. I work in IT at a school some teachers have commented that it's easier to just let students play online games in study halls because at least they stop visiting with neighbors and stop causing disruptions.
US Flag
Perhaps the US needs to invoke copyright over the American Flag and demand royalties, retroactive for the past couple hundred years. Helluva way to pay off the debt!
Paying Devices
While I won't be paying for the NYT anytime soon, I think this is more of a push for charging on devices such as the iPhone, the Kindle, and the fabled Tablet. As more and more closed devices come out, it allows the Times to create partnerships with the device companies to create a built-in paywall. IF the tablet and other portable devices do take off, then the gamble could work. I'm thinking of how the iPod and iTunes helped the music industry to monetize music in the digital age- perhaps the newspaper industry is hoping for the same thing.
Paying customers
I'm guessing people who actually pay Google (e.g. for Google Apps) get better support. http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/features.html
FWIW, my school's a customer of Google Apps for education- virtually identical to business apps, except we get it free. We actually do get decent service and I've been able to get a real, live human being on the phone occasionally. Granted, they always have to pass me on to another department who might or might not call me back a few days later, but I've definitely dealt with worse paid tech support.
Is it really free?
I think Steve's idea is that it's not completely free since you had to buy a Windows license in the first place to get the software. His point is that core components like Windows won't be free any time soon. It's like IE or Windows Media Player- it's another reason to pay for a product (the OS) instead of Mac/Linux.
Did you read the second part of my statement? Let me elaborate:
In schools I've dealt with, the assumption is one, and two if you're lucky, do the scheduling all on computers. This tends to start out as a highly automated process. I tell the computer how many of each class to have per semester and how many students per class. I give scheduling and request priorities. As far as actually building a master schedule, the technique for doing so is lost on us who tell the computer to do it. Whereas in the past, more than one person would word on schedules and they knew and utilized techniques to build a schedule from scratch.
Building schedules also takes a lot of time. Having done it for the past few years, I know when I need to start to make the magic happen. Now, if the entire system goes down and I'm unable to do scheduling (that's the real problem, IMHO- the system not working and not having some way to connect to the database), I'm in a very bad position because the school relies solely on me, who was never trained in the formal art of schedule making, to make schedules.
It is worth noting a lot of schools function under the same premise because scheduling software tends to be complicated, and most administrators get completely lost. Inevitably, the only people able to actually use the database software are the IT people. So, guess who gets to make the schedules? Your friendly IT staff!
I do scheduling for a high school, and doing it without a computer is damn near impossible, in part due to training. I was never trained how to- I just have the student database program do its magic and create a schedules based on parameters I set up. Afterward, I go in and tweak it.
But, if I had to schedule an entire high school on pen and pencil? I wouldn't even know where to start. And telling kids to just "go to their class they signed up for" is a very good recipe for disaster. And this is at a school 170 students. The thought of scheduling 4000 students by hand when you plan on doing it by computer? Good luck.
Yea, I think implementing personal finance into the HS cirriculum is a very good idea. Countless students in college didn't know how to balance checkbooks, why having 8 credit cards maxed out, etc, is a bad idea.
On some levels, it may be up to the parents to educate their kids about personal issues- I was lucky enough to have parents who did so. But what about those whose parents who don't care or have crappy personal financial skills? Does that mean those kids just get the shaft because their parents dropped the ball?
And I agree with the other comment about forgetting high school traditional economics ideas. Hell, the college I went to, econ was a required course for all college students, leaving the door open for HS to gear economics more towards personal finance.
Re: ah, let em kill it off
I pretty much agree with this. I don't buy movies because I only watch them once, and am not a fan of Netflix because I'm very much an impulse watcher- watch one movie a month sometimes and watch a movie nightly some months. Redbox afford me the flexibility to watch movies on my terms at a reasonable price with a decent selection. I won't be pirating, but without redbox, the movie industry also won't be getting my money.