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Comment Why does it *have* to be cloud? (Score 1) 409

Which is, of course, more vulnerable, and therefore the schools systems are more vulnerable, esp. since they're far short of funds to hire enough qualified help to secure all the schools.

Now, LibreOffice goes head to head - ok, some VM scripting, macros, and other bizaree things that Office does may not work... but are you going to look me in the face and tell me that anyone under college is going to use that crap to write papers and homework? For that matter, who in college (except maybe business majors) will use it?

                      mark "and linux is a *lot* easier to manage than the arcanity of M$, and there's zero annual license fees"

Comment If they ever heard of the idea... (Score 1) 245

Several years ago, here in DC, I went to a forum about security and the Internet. On the panel were staffers from then-Sen. Kerry, and from a House committee. After it was over, I went up and spoke to each, individually, and neither had ever *heard* of the concept of an air gap between controls and the 'Net... and we were speaking of nuclear power plants, etc.

Ignorance and "cost savings" make *great* insecurity vectors.

                  mark

Comment Already been slipping in for years (Score 1) 187

As I think I've posted here before, the last three or four years, google results have been getting worse and worse - I regularly see things I've excluded with a -"search term" that have that term, explicitly, in the semi-para that's displayed, And the ads are *much* worse. I was looking for mens boots -ladies -women -womens (and yes, if you give or do not give a plural, the other will show up), and saw a sponsored ad for women's boots

ROI has definitely cut into usefullness. And why hide the advanced search?

                mark

Comment Mine! (Score 1) 187

That was the one that got away from me as a kid, herding them, and I was punished for loosing her. They belonged to us, and so any offspring are *mine*.

And you kids these days, think spring is bad when the dogs and cats start shedding, we needed *rakes* when out mammoths started shedding....

                    mark "and my folks still had the bones of the dinosaurs they helped get rid of...."

Comment Several thoughts (Score 1) 349

First, I'd like to know the domain registrars for the sites - are there a few, or many? If a few, that's a bigger problem.

Second, remember that you can always manually add another nameserver, like one of google's, to your resolv.conf, and fix it so that it's not rewritten (or automatically replace it every time you log into your computer).

Third, thanks for another reason, among many, to not ever want to switch to Comcast.

                mark

Comment Drop the OP as an advisor (Score 1) 983

"Asking around among our tech-savvy friends though, no one has a good answer to the question, 'how would you backup 20TB of data?'. It's not like you could just plug in an external drive, " tells me that you have NO "tech-savvy friends". None. Zip.

Right now, I'm on my biweekly offline backup - that's where we rsync from the online backups to offline backups. This is the 10 3TB drive, if you're interested, out of 13.

Now, if you actually had any "tech-savvy friends", as opposed to people who think they're "power users", they'd have pointed out, first, that what your tech-savvy-friendless friend had was *not* a 20TB file, but many, many files. It's certiainly not any kind of problem to partition them - y'know, divvy up the RAID and have movies and music subdirectories, and break that up by moving all the movies whose title starts with "A" under /movies/A.... and then rsync (or however you prefer) copy enough to close to fill one drive, then swap drives....

Oh, and why can't you do it in an external drive? Certainly, that's what I'm doing *right* *now* as I type with those 13 3TB drives.

                      mark

Comment Pretty damn bad (Score 1) 111

Let's start with the NIH main campus, in Bethesda, MD, where somewhere between 30,000 and 40,000 people work every day. That include maintenance, cafeteria and hospital staff. If between 500 and 1000 left, that's 2.5%-5% reduction.

Then consider the fact that it's probably the largest pure medical research institution in the world. Note that I said "pure research" - we're not talking about billions used to find a drug that's equivalent to, or only marginally better than an existing drug... because your patent on that one's about to run out.

And I suppose most of you are twentysomethings who never get sick, and will live forever (aka willfully ignorant children).

And the US, biggest economy in the world (for the moment) can't keep the budget up, since we have to have 15% or lower taxes on the people whose annual income is larger than most countries, because, heaven forfend, they might have to scrimpt and save, and maybe would be unable to buy that next Hawaiian island....

This sucks.

                      mark

Comment Go for CentOS (Score 1) 287

For one, she will NOT want to install all the constant flow of updates, while CentOS (like upstream, as we say), is *stable*, and she doesn't need the GoshAWoWeeK3wl eyecandy crap so popular with teenagers.

Besides, you've been using CentOS for years. Who do you think is going to get called for tech support... and wouldn't you rather work on something you're *very* familiar with?

              mark "read a zillion horror stories of folks doing tech support for their folks over the phone, esp, WinDoze tech support....:"

Comment Question #1: will Comcast pay legal fees? (Score 1) 253

Will Comcast sign a legally-binding agreement that, in the event that someone uses your hotspot to plot with Al Queda, or d/l kiddie porn, or whatever, that they'd defend you to prevent you from being charged in connection with it? Which of them will go in your place to Gitmo, or San Quentin, or whatever....?

                      mark "not a chance in hell I'd agree"

Comment Unanswered questions (Score 1) 255

1. How were the questionees chosen?
2. How much of the utterly ignorant answers were from the same people?

And, for extra credit, what was the political affiliation of the people giving those responses? Note that people with high incomes don't tend to answer surveys....

                    mark "there are two kinds of Republicans: millionaires, and suckers"

Comment Economic systems (Score 0) 126

Hi, Eric,

      Haven't seen you since Philcon. Yep, back to heckle you....

      So, in the light of a) the dot.com bubble, massively under- or non-regulated, and the as close to free market as they could make it economic collapse of '07-08, in what way Libertarianism's goals have prevented the collapse, or moderated its affects on all the folks hit hard by it, as opposed to government intervention, as weak and cut back as early as it was?

      And directly related, how can I sue, say, either Lehman Bros or the credit rating agencies, who I learned only a year or two after the crash were *paid* by the companies they rated to rate them? And what would my options on getting a judge to hear the case, with, say, Bank of America on the other side, and their choice of judge?

        Say 'hi' to Cathy, btw.

                        mark

Comment Journalist: doesn't get it, and doesn't know that (Score 1) 353

"Jet fighter", well, no, it's a propellor fighter.
"Computer-directed flight controls" - no computer existed in 1939, except for the people whose job title was "computer" (and who probably used adding machines).

Then there's the question of how it would perform in heavy cloud cover, or rain.

Oh, yeah, and finally, the journalist's enTHUsiasm makes it seems as though they would have wanted the Nazis to win WWII, which I take some exception with.

                    mark

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