FYI it is strongly encouraged (and considered best practices by Microsoft) to run the edge transport role on a separate server (or VM) in an isolated dmz network. Whats more, exchange (and windows server for that matter) has come a long, long, long way since Pentium 4s were state of the art. MS has it's faults but they have stepped up their game in the server world in recent years. And the network stack was taken directly from BSD (as the BSD license allows them to do legally) so I doubt they are different in any substantial way.

Google's data mining is annoying at best, BP's oil spill is an environmental disaster that will harm millions of people (not to mention wildlife) in ways we can't even begin to calculate yet. Applying the same standard is stupid, because it implies the scale of the problem is in anyway similar. Furthermore, while it is fairly understandable to make mistakes in software systems that will at worst collect data about unencrypted wifi traffic, it is not understandable to make mistakes in a critical safety device that lives and the economic and environmental prosperity of an entire coastline depend on.

Google is in the wrong, and so is BP. But to pretend that the seriousness of the way they are wrong is in the same ballpark is ridiculous, and therefore the expect the same reaction is ridiculous. If you do an employee background check, and one of your employees was fined for littering, the other convicted of theft, manslaughter, criminal negligence, bribing public officials, and destruction of property, you would react in different ways. Thats the difference in severity we are talking about.

A better reason to make them static lengths of time and not based on the arbitrary date someone croaks at. Does an author (or his family) deserve less money because they get hit by a car the day after releasing their book? Pick an arbitrary time period of reasonable length, like say 20 years. That means by the time people are old enough to produce creative content of their own, the work they grew up with an were inspired by is fair game. Imagine how awesome it would be if the Ninja Turtles, GI Joe, Star Wars and Transformers were all public domain? There's already plenty of fan work, but they have to constantly dodge lawyers. There's no doubt that for a certain generation these things are a huge part of their culture, with meaning beyond the original works themselves. A person or company should not be allowed to own the common culture, only keep contributing to it.

He specifically said he needs OS X or Windows to make the district happy. You can disagree with that requirement but that doesn't help anyone. If hes in the position to ask this question I'm pretty sure he is aware of Linux, and vague suggestions of dump Windoze by M$ and use linux to do it with no actual advice of HOW to do it, is not helpful. In a car analogy it's like if someone asked you "which engine option should I order for my Ferrari" and you responded with "Screw Ferrari, they are overpriced, you can build a sports car in your garage from scratch".

XP is dead. If you aren't stuck to a legacy system (as this guy isn't) you would be a complete fool to stick with XP. It would be a mistake you will constantly regret. Most of the things you would want to extend XP's features are built into 7/Server 2003. Remote administration, Patching, Application Control, Network Image Deployment, locking down the desktop like deep freeze does, all can be accomplished with built in (and supported) features. Security is also better (requiring drivers to be signed, built in support for full disk encryption, Memory address randomization, better default settings, better implementation of SFC, etc), and the systems are a lot more usable running as a non-admin without lots of extra scripting work. You also get better ip v6 support, and improved network performance in general. Just the fewer headaches in patching alone makes it worthwhile (even with a WSUS server, I find myself frequently manually updating XP machines, I've never once had to do it on a 7 machine).

The 7/Server 2008 networks we have deployed require substantially less maintenance then the XP networks. Support for XP is being phased out on new hardware, as it is you have to stick to certain long-term support models to get support for XP from the big OEM's (there's a difference between "heres some drivers, good luck" and officially supported). 7 is a mature OS, if it makes you feel better think of it as Vista service pack 3. Furthermore if you don't have the cash to shell out for VLC licenses, expect trouble when Microsoft drops downgrade rights on OEM licenses. Setting up a brand spanking new network with Windows XP is like making a brand new web app from scratch, and designing it in Visual Basic to only work in IE 6. You can do it, and the technology is tried and true, but you will be creating more work for an inferior result that will bite you in the ass in a short time frame. The only reason for not deploying 7 on new hardware where you are not constrained by legacy code is you want to stay in your comfort zone, and are scared to learn new things. If that's the case, you need to GTFO IT, it's the wrong field for you, and you are doing your clients/employers a disservice. Being skeptical of new technology is fine, but being irrationally afraid of it is stupid. As far as Engineering/Science goes, any commercial software package that can't run at all under 7 is probably on it's way out anyways. Whats bleeding edge today will be a generation behind by the time the students get into the real world.

All that said, I think XP/7 is the WRONG way to go. If you want a Windows environment, your best bet will be to buy some thin clients, network boot them with something like ThinStation, and have them RDP to a farm of nice beefy 2008 R2 Terminal Servers. Thin clients are the only thing I've seen hold up to a school environment. Unlike a corporate environment where you can expect the employees to only cause damage out of ignorance, high school students will be actively malicious, and will destroy/break/steal things just to do it. If you lose a thin client, the teacher can yank it out, pull a spare from the closet, and send the old one to be diagnosed/redeployed in your spare time. Because they are stateless, if one is stolen you are out a couple hundred bucks and not any information. It will be easier to setup a consistent environment, and you can shop around to different hardware vendors if needed while maintaining a consistent experience for the students. It will be easier to create flexible lesson plans, install software, and you can often really cut down on licensing costs. Thin client tech has come a long way, and if you spec your servers properly, and have a decent network, you can't tell the difference. I took a class in Solidworks (a ram hungry and CPU hungry 3d CAD program that makes your average office workstation dog slow) that was taught in a lab using thin clients and terminal servers, and it ran better on them then my personal laptop, despite having 20 other users on the same server. The instructor could easily drop files on our desktop, add or remove programs/options in advance, etc. If you ever got something really screwed up, worst case scenario was you logged out and back in. Ive since been part of several thin client deployments and I love them.

As an added bonus,it's even possible to allow students to connect to the server farm from home, so they can work from their home pc without needing a license for all the software. Another school friendly facet of the tech is you can easily swap which class is being taught in what lab, without needing to reimage the desktops to get the correct software load. Frankly for education there isn't any other way to do it that is as good, and the long term maintenance savings (1 admin managing the server farm is as good as 5 managing desktops) more then pay for the initial outlay.

This is a false dichotomy. We can improve the infant mortality rates in the USA and help infants in 3rd world countries. The skills required are different. In this country we need improved hospital standards, better doctor training, increased access to prenatal care, and better education and care for expectant mothers in general. In Brazil they need plastic backpacks with incubators. These guys had the skills and the ideas to do the later, but not the ability to do the former, so they did what they could. It is far more then bitching about it on Slashdot will ever do.

The problems of the US health care system are entirely political. Doctors, inventors, engineers, can't do much to help on the large scale. We have the technology, we have the funding, we have the infrastructure. These guys saw a problem it was within their power to fix, or at least try to help, so they did it.

I had a customer with a Drobo. They bought it as a backup device. In my experience it was quite terrible compared to stuffing a bunch of drives in a box and running FreeNas or something on it. The device itself is quite expensive, and we had lots of problems with it, and finally wound up relegating it to a 3rd tier backup role. Among the problems we had;
1. It takes a LONG time to rebuild. It took 3 days to rebuild after a drive failure, during which another drive failure would have caused complete data loss.
2. I/O performance was sub par. I don't remember the exact rates, but in our testing backups would take 3x as long to the Drobo as they would to a simple 1 tb USB drive.
3. We ran into issues with very large files (>50 gigabytes) which the filesystem it was formatted in supported without issue.
4. When we had a hardware failure in the device, which caused it to constantly fail a drive that independent testing showed was fine, and despite the customer purchasing the additional "Drobocare" extended warranty, between getting the run around from their support (who kept making the same suggestions over and over instead of escalating the case) it took over a month to get it replaced, and by the time it was done it would have been cheaper to throw it in the trash. I wouldn't want to rely on them for anything.

Overall it was a very negative experience. The only thing I could recommend them for would be for graphic artists or something that works solo and doesn't have the tech skills to set up a better solution.

In related news, ShakaUVM is upset about the kids on his lawn, music these days, and how television never has the shows he likes anymore.

The unions of the Prison Guards are one of the biggest players in the "prisoner industry". Even in government run prisons, they have a vested interest in high prisoner populations, and have a lot of political clout. Anytime a politician tries to reform prisons, he can be guaranteed to be slammed for being "soft on crime". The reality is most prisoners are from the poor and minorities and have little to no political clout. They are an easy target, and the few brave enough to stand up for their rights are trampled down by the reflex to "punish" rather then reform.

If that is the case, why pull it when they got "caught"? There is no "source" to compare too, the crack is made by decompiling the original exe into assembly, looking for the DRM checks, and removing them or replacing them with code that always returns the check as passed. The crack exe is normally much smaller then the original, because a lot of assembly has been stripped out. Given the nature of the work and the age of the game, it's doubtful the original group is even around, much less willing to assist an entity that spends most of it's time calling crackers like them the scum of the universe, responsible for every lost sale since the beginning of time.

At the time, it was normal to have working cracks within 24 hours of release, so it can't be that difficult. Given the only way to prove the binary is harmless is to go through it line by line in assembly, it would be easier to develop a crack from scratch then verify an existing one, especially considering they have access to the source to look and see exactly where the DRM would be called to start with.

I think the crack is probably harmless, 99% of them are. But every time you run an exe as admin(as most of the people who buy this on steam will), you are pretty much letting it do whatever it wants. And that means caution needs to be exercised, especially when the exe has been modified by a source that is inherently untrustworthy. Verifying a binary is harmless is pretty much impossible, even ones made without malicious intent can be dangerous because of bugs. So we are left to the source of the binary to give us our strongest indicator of whether or not it is safe. In this case Rockstar is claiming to be the source, because gamers will trust them, but the actual source is an unknown, unverifiable hacker group known only by an alias and an irc channel. Since the main technical benefit of purchasing the retail product (ethical implications aside) is NOT having to run binaries from shady hacker groups, this is a betrayal of their customers.

The bigger problem is the game industry is always telling us game cracks are full of viruses and trojans. And while I generally don't believe them, I wouldn't use a 3rd party game crack on a pc that had any sensitive information on it. In this case, they are redistributing a binary that they didn't code, and without extensive analysis (ie more work then creating a new patch from scratch) have no way to tell it does not contain malicious code. The fact that Rockstar distributed a binary of unknown origin with no Q+A done on it is a bad, bad thing.

That's an accounting problem, not a technical problem. It can be solved quickly and easily. Raise the pay to whatever is necessary to attract appropriate talent. HR departments across the world somehow manage to figure this out. I know government jobs are fond of pay grades and other such nonsense, but if our legislators gave a crap about the security and prosperity of our nation they could fix the issue in an afternoon.

It's a sad state of affairs, but when you think about it, modern ISP's must be treated as a malicious and disruptive man in the middle attack when it comes to DNS. Not only do they constantly interfere in proper dns operation to run various scams, they do so blatantly and with no fear of recrimination. DNSSEC can't get here fast enough, I just hope ISPs don't start rewriting destination addresses to continue their abuse.

Nlite is nice, but a number of drivers have odd issues that require weird hacks when slipstreaming. I always use the mass storage pack from http://driverpacks.net/ after I use nlite but before I create the iso. I have yet to find a system it didn't support, and it keeps from wasting a lot of time and effort when you can reuse the same cd over hundreds of different controllerrs.

Every little piss-ant city employee is not a highly paid professional who designed, built, and maintained the city governments entire network infrastructure. When the street sweepers refuse to turn their keys in to anyone but they Mayor, tell them to fuck off. When someone who you have given a lot of money and entrusted with the security and reliability of the systems that keep critical city infrastructure wants 10 minutes of your time, it's probably a good idea to fucking listen. If the city's top lawyer wanted a word with the mayor on a matter he considered urgent, do you think he'd wait?

The whole thing is a farce. Terry Childs may have deserved to be fired. From the sounds of it, he allowed himself to become a critical, irreplaceable part of the infrastructure, which in of itself is a good reason to fire him. Clearly his ego and misguided sense of dedication to his job was clouding his judgment. His managers should be fired for being completely incompetent. They allowed a situation to develop where Childs was irreplaceable. They then decided to fire him, but developed no plan on how to smoothly transition away. And after they fired him, and realized how incredibly they had fucked up, they threw him in jail, turning a bad situation into a disaster. They passed over repeated chances to defuse the situation, all to save face. They proceeded to try their best to ruin a man's life just to avoid admitting they had made mistakes, and it looks like they have succeeded. By all accounts the city's network worked flawlessly the entire time. They were apparently convinced he would use his passwords to bring the network down just because he was upset about being fired, but there is no evidence he attempted to do so or would have attempted. To do so would have destroyed his career, that he clearly cared a lot about if he invested the time and effort into getting a CCIE. Furthermore, it's doubtful that had he given all the passwords, he would have lost his ability to do so. Given how much they relied on him, and his knowledge of the network, he couldn't have found a way even if they changed all the passwords he gave them? Theres always a backup account somewhere, or a forgotten out-of-band management tool, etc.

The precedent this court case leaves is "support your former employers for free, forever, or go to jail". I for one am not looking forward to getting calls from a former employer at 3 am because even though I left 6 months ago, they forgot to ask me for the password to the backup system, and now it's on the fritz, and I refuse to answer and tell them how to login, and the account credentials, they will call the cops.