Which is what the vast majority of people have been telling terrorists to do for quite some time. Sadly, it seems they started listening...

Yes, the tasty tasty horror!

Maintaining a large network of interconnected school sites is only "low cost" if you're doing it wrong.

I work for a District of 50+ sites with a mix of windows, mac, and linux(server) machines. We have roughly equal amounts of issues with both the windows and mac machines. They don't have the same issues, but when you put large amounts of macs in an enterprise environment for years, you start to understand that "it just works" is a marketing ploy, not an accurate statement. Having access through our Apple rep to their systems engineers was also enlightening on how screwed up or incompatible some of their solutions are. It's just the same crap in a different shiny wrapper. The only conspiracy is the cult of Apple trying to present the Mac as the solution to the PC. They both have warts, they just appear in different places.

Depending on the size of the district, the mood and power of the one giving the order, and the political capital behind that one, you might get your way, or you might be shown the door. From my observations within a K-12 school district, the worst security decisions are the ones forced on IT. You can say no to the kids, no to the parents, no to the staff, but saying no to the superintendent or the board is career suicide. You can have your say about why "x" is a bad decision, lay out a worst case scenario, and even better if it happens during a board meeting where the minutes are recorded. But if you're over-ridden, you do what you're paid to, or start looking for a new job.

School IT guy here, yes, I've seen Downadup/Conficker spread through older neglected servers. Technically this is a worm, but I'm not overbearing on semantics like some. It appeared to gain entry to our network through a flash drive, as we did have strong proxy and filtering in place, but that only serves as a perimeter defense. Once inside our network, it spread among the older servers and started running brute force attacks against the active directory system, causing many accounts to lock out (which led to it's discovery). Ports were locked down to cut the worm's spread and communication, and cleanup was mostly complete within a week with a combination of scripting and manual cleanup on the more stubborn servers. Some WMI rebuilds were also needed on some machines, but even though it was decently wide spread, it wasn't that difficult to resolve. However, we had a competent staff, and thereafter we also had an A/V budget (imagine that!).

With what I've seen, I would concur. Some absolutely dangerous settings have been implemented solely due to political orders. This is not to be confused with political pressure, which may be able to be shifted or avoided, but an order given because of political pressure on a board or district administrator. You can try to reason, try to explain, present worst case scenarios, and make sure it's all documented, follow any CYA policy you can think of. Depending on the situation, you may even try to go over the head of the one giving the order. But in the end, if that's the order, you follow it or you endanger your job.

Those were a unique time. Computers were becoming widely available and they booted to a command line. Just getting around required some basic level of understanding that could naturally progress one towards becoming tech-savvy. For quite awhile now, kids don't delve nearly as deep into computers. They delve into the gui based software or games, but they barely scratch the surface on things. Opening up a command line is often viewed now as voodoo, written in an arcane language. Even some of the younger techs that work the front lines for a help desk barely comprehend a command line.

Yes, I understand that I'm going on about the command line, but it's been a pretty useful point of reference for judging someone's capability for understanding or finding out about resolving a decent variety of issues, when measured along with other metrics.

I would submit that this also depends on the level of tasks required of the windows admins, and the level of capability of the windows admins as well. Unix admins, and for that matter Windows admins with *nix experience seem to be much better at automating mundane and redundant tasks then the average windows admin, which (from what I've observed) seems to be a large consumer of windows admin's time.

You've been fortunate. In my days as the PC monkey I saw a few fail. I've seen more power supply and RAM failures, but the only mobo failure I encountered was a cousin who ran his tower open (he was tinkering with it). His brother threw a balled up gum wrapper (foil) into the box. *facepalm*

I'd suspect you either chose some nasty mobos, or that you have heat or power issues in your locality that have not been addressed. I've got a q6600 that has been sitting on a gigabyte GA-G33m-S2L board for the past 5 years, and it was mostly on as well. The only thing I've changed out in the chassis since it was built is 2 fans and the dust that travels through it.

Maybe on a clean install. But not with all the malware that comes along with that free software that promises a free ipad after x amount of uses! That 8 year old computer would be non-responsive!

Tough choice for the mods here: Funny or Insightful?

FTFY

It's exactly the same attitude you see in US politics. From top to bottom it's about compromise being seen as a weakness. It's about the "my way or the highway" mentality. That kind of reasoning gets us nowhere. Which incidently may soon be where you'll be able to buy a twinkie or ding-dong.

You can think of the Ho-Hos. Meanwhile, I'll be enjoying a private moment with my ding-dong.

...and the default assumption is more often then not correct.