I remember seeing a (print) advertisement 20+ years ago; it may have even been a full-pager in a big paper. Xerox was extolling the benefits of the paperless office. Fast forward to today and they are selling more printers. What's old is new again.

Whenever a user asks me how their file got corrupted, I usually mention solar flares as a _mostly_ joking answer. Soooo... should I proactively start a background verify on my SAN over the weekend?

I had an old Apple inkjet printer. Once I drafted some fake citations to leave on friends' domors. Noise complaints and that kind of thing. My buddy's dad found one and called the local police. Cops were at my house a little later. I had received the only _real_ citation in a few weeks, so it was pretty easy to track me down (I didn't shovel my parents' sidewalk on a snow day, a no-no when you live a block away from the sheriff, a church, and a school).

Be sure to check out PDQ Deploy. It has fed my Altiris 6.9 needs since switching to SCCM for imaging and other proactive management, provisioning, and deployment. But if I want something done right this very second now, PDQ is the only way to go. Anything in SCCM takes time, sometimes a LOT of time.

I wish this even partially made up for the horrible way they handled the Altiris acquisition.

He _did_ used to work at Namesys for Hans. Joking aside, his wife is pretty cool. She teaches IT/networking at my alma mater, RIT. I've met a few other (now former) Namesys employees in the past, probably some of the brightest minds I've ever known.

I can't get to slashdot. Let's troubleshoot!
[root@wang]# ifconfig
bash: ifconfig: command not found

[root@wang]# iptables -F
bash: iptables: command not found

I just rewatched Steve's iPhone demo: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_m2F_ph_uU

When he clicks on The Office and says, "Let's watch a TV show", Pirates of the Caribbean plays.

I'm not so sure about that. New York has a weak castle doctrine compared to Florida (including SYG), but that's not even what was being contested. In New York you have a duty to flee when confronted with deadly physical force. Only in the absence of your ability to flee can you can respond in kind with like force. A litmus test can be broken down with "AOJ":

Ability: Did TM have the ability to cause GZ grave bodily harm (GBH)? The answer, based on evidence shown at the trial, is very clearly yes. An unarmed 4 year old would not have the ability to cause GBH.

Opportunity: did TM have the opportunity to cause GZ grave bodily harm? The answer, based on evidence shown at the trial, is very clearly yes. A teenager with a gun in California would not have the opportunity to cause GZ (in Florida) GBH.

Jeopardy: Was TM an immediate threat to cause GZ grave bodily harm at the time of the shooting? The answer, based on evidence shown at the trial, is very clearly yes. A pack of MMA fighters on the other side of the street would not place GZ in immediate jeopardy of GBH.

Any firearm owner in NYS should have been acquitted of murder/manslaughter in a similar situation of being pinned down and having a life-threatening beating handed down on your face.

Should GZ have handled the situation differently? I'll bet GZ wishes he did, but that's not what the jury's job was. The jury had to respond to charges of murder or manslaughter, not to determine whether or not he was a douchebag.

It's too bad the cash from this patent selloff won't likely be seen in the local economy of Rochester, NY, Kodak's home town. We've pretty much given up completely on the once largest local employer. Too many of my friends have long since had severance packages run out. She's not sinking, rather she's already resting on the bottom of the ocean flapping a bit.

I wonder what is actually in the patent portfolio that Google and Apple can sue each other over in 5 years.

We keep a few large garbage bags in our colo rack toolbox. If we ever need to haul gear out for RMA or something, I don't want to have to worry about rain on my way to the parking lot.

Yes, they are selling you a Seagate Constellation 1TB drive for waaaay more than what you would pay on NewEgg. But they burn in their drives before shipping them to you. This saves them money in CRUs and saves you time in drive replacements. More than anything, you are paying for their support.

From someone who recently experienced a pretty nasty multiple-drive failure in an EMC array, holy shit their support is amazing. I will continue to spend my (employer's) money on EMC gear based solely on how they handled my recent "situation".

(I had multiple drives in the same AX4 enclosure report multiple soft errors simultaneously. SOP is to replace failed drives, but they insisted on proactively replacing the rest of the drives in that enclosure. And the AX4 is one of their crapola products. If something like this happened on our VNX, I would have a team of CEs in my office sweating all over my desk.)

Don't forget about Compellant. That was another great acquisition, IMO a best in class SAN product line.

I work for an art and design school. While we don't give our students laptops (yet?), most of our faculty are equipped with one.

Network license keying is your friend. FlexLM (AutoCAD, Solidworks, etc. for interior/industrial design) and Sasafras Keyserver (for everything else) are two products that I rely on heavily to maintain legality with licensing. Some products (Quark) come with their own weird licensing thingie (java-based, Windows only daemon).

I'm the Windows/Linux part of a mostly Mac school. We just moved into level 2 of the Altiris Client Management Suite and are planning a rollout in the next few months. This is really going to revolutionize the way we deal with desktops and laptops (software virtualization services (SVS), recovery solution, self-service software delivery portal, etc.). On the Mac side we use Filewave, Netboot, and Netrestore for package management.

IIRC, Keyserver doens't give you the granularity that you are talking about. Buuuut, you could set up different versions of the same keyed app and allocate different license counts to each one depending on where the .EXE/.APP file ends up. Keyserver also allows you to check-out a license to a laptop, but that decreases your total count no matter if it is being used or not.

Running apps on a terminal server might suck. Unless you are pushing some really CPU intensive jobs, it is probably going to be fine to leave the majority of the processing time to the laptops. By CPU intensive, I mean an AfterEffects render that takes two weeks on a dual-dual Opteron 270. Or a Maya scene that takes a few days on 23 dual Opteron boxes. Patience Daniel-san. =)

Then again, if you are looking into TS for licensing issues... that might suck. People like to use software whenever and where ever. Although network access seems to be as ubiquitous as breathing nowadays, there are still some kids that don't live in earshot of a hotspot. Then again, we make faculty VPN into our network so that they can check out software licenses from home; we block access to lots of stuff from off campus for obvious reasons.

Don't hesitate to give your software/hardware vendors a ring. They know what other schools are doing and might be able to lend a good deal of help. Oh, and software donations are always good.

My $0.02.

~jps