I should clear some things up. 1000 computers is the total supported. At any given time only a few are being replaced. That $1000 includes a pretty generous warranty and monitor. The warranty is pretty much a given with Dell as they don't sell parts for their computers very long on their website. We get about 5 years out of a computer and the 18 month reference was so we minimize the number of configurations floating around. If a machine breaks, we can say it's config 2010 and pull a part from that shelf. Also, consider that we already have staff and it would be considered "soft time."

For longevity, current backup systems are just silly. They are simply just not abstracted enough. For REAL archival what's needed is an active system like the Internet but one that guarantees n redundancy. Perhaps a p2p like system with nodes backing up files. This abstracts away whether they are going on SATA, IDE, SCSI, Tape, whatevs. The local machine handles all the hardware details. When newer, better, cheaper technology comes along, the old data is automatically able to propagate onto the new storage mechanisms. I see this all the time working in the IT industry. I have backups from 10 years ago I can not read because we no longer have a working tape drive to read it. We need to separate ourselves from the hardware.

What the hell did these students do 10 years ago? AFAIK two semesters of English and perhaps 1 semester of literature are the norm at every reputable college in the U.S. If their English is too poor for your physics exam, they probably have no hope of graduating.

The story should have just been "do you agree/disagree with ebonics? Discuss."

The fact he doesn't have a Ph.D is misleading. He has a bunch of bachelor and masters degrees. Pretty darn difficult ones if you ask me. Perhaps he saw more value in learning a bunch of related subjects pretty well instead of specializing. Regardless, he is definitely a product of the traditional university system.

This didn't help the cause. I had a school project with 5 people and we decided to use wave. After awhile we got tired of waiting for invites and just bought them off ebay. Unlike other google products, wave is only useful within wave. Google voice is still in invite mode, but I can text people without google voice. Gmail (when it was invite only a number of years ago) could still email other people. Google wave is only useful if ALL the people in your group have it and the barrier of entry was just too high. Even when you had an account and could invite other people, it took a few days for them to receive their invite.

You sir, are my hero. I've never been able to put into words exactly why I hate 3D, but you have. People keep comparing 3D to the sound and color advancements, but they don't take away from a movie. 3D does. 3D actually makes the movie worse for me. Not because of the headaches, or glasses, or anything like that, but because it looks so fake and in no way anything my brain has seen in the real world.

I don't think it's as vague as everyone is making it to be. Since his department is paying the IT department it most likely means data on a windows network through CIFS that is backed up and redundant. This is a common thing.

I was able to generate some errors by putting carefully crafted data into a website form once. I notified the company that made the software and their two programmers were such arrogant jackasses. "Oh well they are stored procedures so it's not a problem." I was so annoyed at their arrogance I got permission to attempt to crack the website and basically got full access to the box and all the data and a lot of data on their network through windows file sharing (sql server had some stored procedures to execute files if I remember correct, this was like 3 years ago) in about 20 minutes. Oh yeah, this software stored all of my company's employee medical records and as it was hosted stored all their other clients medical records as well.

The moral is that security is a very complex beast. They kept asking what product they could buy to fix this and I just laughed. They bought some McAfee product in the end that only masked the problem. Input needs to be completely sanitized and relying on tricks like stored procedures for security is a band aid. McAfee products don't protect against security holes due to logic mistakes.

Fuckin' McAfee...

You can manually copy a good DAT over and a good copy of svchost.exe into their proper directories. However our copy/paste wouldn't work so I wrote a batch file because the copy command still seemed to work ok. Because we had to do it on so many we didn't have time to type anything, just run a .bat file with those two copy commands and a reboot.

We've used Mcafee for years. It can take a brand new quad core computer with 4 gigs of ram and make it operate at half its specs. It's garbage. I've used a few antivirus products over the years and all its enterprise features have never worked properly. It's purely marketing and sending PHB's free swag. There are a lot of anti virus companies with the features you mentioned that do it far better than Mcafee. The only reason they are still in business is because of marketing.

For us, there was no possibility of anything automated, the machines lost all network access. svchost.exe was 0 bytes. At around 2pm when we realized what actually happened we hung up with them and their "rollback to last dat" bullshit (how can you push that out to a machine with no network access) and manually restored svchost.exe and the last dat to all our machines affected. Hundreds of them. It was quite a day. Fuckin mcafee....

Same here. I love that we spent 3 hours on hold with Mcafee w/ no automated message acknowledging the problem. In fact, they gave us a solution that didn't work once we got on the phone with them so we had to come up with a fix based on internet reports and manually do it on hundreds of machines. I also love how the EULA will probably mean we have no legal recourse for hundreds of people sitting around with their thumbs up their butts today with useless computers.