Seriously, the course I did as a teenager (on real typewriters) was advertised as "learn typing in 8 hours" which turned out to mean twelve 40-minute lessons. But it delivered and has been extremely useful to me. It was 8 hours very well spent. It has mainly benefited me in writing emails and other documents though, rather than for programming. Programs generally consist of relatively few words and lots of symbols, and symbols are relatively hard to touch-type (with a few honourable exceptions).

The quoted situation in a research institution where email is the most efficient solution is probably fairly rare, even today. Sending a huge attachment to a mobile phone for example would be considered quite antisocial (if it succeeded), because it could cost the recipient money for bandwidth or storage, delay the reception of other messages or even render the whole device unusable. And it could easily be done by accident, because file sizes are not something most users are constantly aware of.

It's nevertheless true that arbitrary email attachment size limits cause a LOT of pain. They cause delivery failures that are often unexpected, with bounce notifications that may be delayed or non-existent and workarounds that are often difficult and unreliable. To be honest, it's shameful that we (software developers) haven't fixed this years ago, and it's shameful that users are sometimes blamed for the problems.

There are of course mail clients (e.g. Thunderbird) that can automatically upload large attachments somewhere and send a link instead. It's not a bad solution (even for the original quoted situation) but it's far from common and often has its own set of implementaton problems - as the OP says, it may mean "we lose control of our data or it disappears in 12 months".

There are lots of other issues with attachments as well. They often can't be scanned for malware or have their content searched or indexed, which limits their usefulness. If they can be scanned, they're a potential security and a privacy risk. If they CAN'T be scanned that may also be a security or privacy risk. There are tradeoffs.

Using emails as a filing system is also problematic. A lot of people do this because it's convenient ("efficient") and I would never interfere with someone else's workflow without a very good reason. But email was designed as a communication system not a filing system and it doesn't scale well - in particular, it's often necessary to archive old messages for performance or cost reasons and that can cause unintended information loss. The same goes for calendars and address books. There are some good proprietary solutions but the standards are a mess.

In the Netherlands, why do you ask? Point taken about Europe not being a "country" though, should have said "union" but sounded a bit awkward.

One person's "foreign" is another person's "home sweet home". I'm guessing the OP is in the USA, and a high proportion of cyberattacks actually originate there (which makes sense, considering the high proportion of internet-connected computers). So blocking "foreign" attacks isn't going to solve the problem, just delay it a bit.

For someone like me outside the USA, blocking that whole country doesn't make much sense, even though we know it sure as hell can't be trusted! It would mean blocking Google, Facebook...hmm, perhaps I'd better stop before I convince myself to try it.

Also, my webserver isn't in my country (I'm in London, the server's in Europe, which used to be the same country but sadly no longer). So I would have to change hosts to achieve this.

Russia, China and Brazil together have a MUCH higher population than the USA. That naturally means they also have more criminals (though quite possibly a lower proportion). So by blocking such "foreigners" you would cut yourself off from the majority of humanity. I know some people consider that an attractive idea, but I'm not one of them.

Or someone else failed, which is not something you can control.

I'd love to get rid of my printer but it's still the only practical way to make shipping labels, for example. Also, good luck getting my aged Mum (or even her carers) to use a tablet. Tablets aren't really large enough for reading sheet music at a distance either.

Still, the "paperless" office is approaching and there are many days where the printer doesn't get turned on now.

My Galaxy S4 says it was last updated in November 2016. Must be pretty vulnerable by now :-(

Webmin will load all the right packages and set up Apache, mail, DNS etc. for you on a variety of Linux distributions.You can use it like a control panel afterwards or just ignore it and use the usual text config files and the command line from then on if you want. It's free and quick to run. I find it saves a lot of time (and mistakes). I made a tutorial if that's any use.

A password is only safe for about 8 seconds (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/click_online/4423733.stm). A responsible company really should be asking you to change passwords more often than that. Forcing you, really.

Archiving old media is a time-consuming process, unfortunately. How many is "several" in your case? If it's more than a dozen or so you will probably run out of time and patience and will want to consider only doing the most precious ones or else paying someone else to do it. Also it may take a bit of experimentation to get the quality right. I asked around my friends and this is a common experience - so much so that I was considering making a business out of it.

If you're considering outsourcing, there are quite a few companies that will do this for you for around $10 per tape. Obviously this can get expensive if you have hundreds of tapes - it's up to you to decide how much your time and the tapes are worth to you. Unless you're willing to trust the post (or a courier) with your tapes, you'll need to find a local company.

A reputable commercial company is likely to get a better result than you would yourself, unless you're the obsessive compulsive type (not unlikely on Slashdot, I guess.)

There's an interesting blog post from Tomi Ahonen about this - he agrees it probably won't happen. http://communities-dominate.bl...

No-one seems to have mentioned what seems to me an obvious solution: Make it very clear that communication with anyone else during an exam will result in disqualification, then verify this often enough that the risk of discovery is real, for example using RF sniffers or cameras. Specifically prohibiting certain devices seems to be missing the point.

I'm not a teacher, so I guess this "obvious" solution must have been found impractical for some reason - privacy concerns or too much manpower required?

I currently use two IP4 static addresses - one at the webhosting company I use in the US, essential for the SSL certificate (shared between several domains, yech!) and one at my home address in the UK, not essential but losing it and using dyndns wouldn't really free up another address. Last year I asked both suppliers what plans they had for IPv6 adoption, and both replied "none". It seems to me they're leaving it a bit late, especially at the hosting end. If I think of all the places where I currently have an opportunity to input an IPv4 port number (even though it's usually just left at the default) it comes to quite a large number.

I too was with them in the beginning but they lost the plot (the founder even got a suspended jail sentence).

Agreed about the other ISPs as well - I've found bethere to be pretty good though.

I've got a Curta calculator (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curta) that's about the same vintage (1964, but earlier models date from 1948) that still works. Does that count?

Life's about deciding what's important (to you), and doing it. If what you want to do is also important to mankind, then you should want to persuade lots of other people to go in the same direction. It seems to me that Megacorp is offering you a great way to do that. They might also help you avoid the common mistakes in the process.

You should check the small print carefully, though. If their direction turns out to be different to yours, you need some way to escape.

Don't worry too much about losing your freedom - if you want lots of people to help you, you inevitably have to put some time and effort into convincing them. You will still achieve much more than by working in isolation. And you can delegate the boring bits if you have money.