When dealing with Utilities, there is no way for the company to pay back without taking the money from the rate payers. The only real way to do it is for the government ot require the company to issue stock representing a percentage of the company value that would go to the government. Therefore the owners of the company ie stock holders pay for the damage they caused by placing idiots in charge and the government can then sell the stock to pay for the cleanup or hold it in trust to ensure this does not happen again.

Despite the hate for ATT corperate, they have some extremely good engineers who are either scratching there heads or totally freaking out.

My problem is all the school administrators talking about how this improves campus safety. Even though it can only track tagged kids. The guy with high powered rifle walking onto the campus cant be sensed or tracked by the system. The other thing is these are active battery powered tags, which are very expensive. Why cant they just have standard cards with passive rfid chips, like a lot of us use for mass transit. Then instead of a tracking system switch all the doors in the school to remain locked at all times and only unlock for an ID swipe. With the kids badges opening doors they need to get into (main doors, bathrooms, even classrooms for their specific classes) and Staff cards open most doors. Then the guy with a gun comes to the campus and can't get in the door to start with (unless they shoot out the lock but that starts police response) The campus is more safe because most doors are closed and locked by default making it harder to go from room to room. I think these things are a privacy night mare. Most kids will keep them in purses or wallets, if I worked in retail the first thing I do is place readers by the doors and checkout registers that ping the cards since I can read them in someones purse or pocket. I only get a number but I will know how often that number enters the store, when and what they spend money on. If they use a credit card at checkout I now know the name of the person and can attach it to the ID number. There are no laws preventing me from doing this. If the tags where passive this would be almost impossible.

Apple ran solaris for years and then eventually moved to OS X, when they did that some of there employees at mac world refered to eating there own dog food. OS X is BSD, and server can run without a UI, They probably will run the whole thing on OSX, mind you they will probably be optimizing the stack.

We keep on looking at this stuff and we just standardized on mac minis without applecare. If a computer does not fail in the first year chances are it never will. If we replace 1 out of every 10 machines out of pocket we are still ahead in warranty costs. Windows volume licenses in corp/education/government can hop machines. The big part is Mac Minis are basically mill spec intel boxes. Standard drivers good speed etc. For 90 percent of the button pushers they are always powerful enough. It seems an odd choice but apple seems to get more reliable machines out of china than anyone else, we simply spend less time with dead boxes with the macs. The big money cost is internal staff assembling your own machines. Even if you think you are fast you are not and after 100 machines you will never want to build another computer again.

Its not just a website its a complete revamping of there entire infrastructure, network, workstation, servers, phone,s software and employee training. Plus... They are Oracle based. Of course they should be moving towards open source, lower those license costs.

Not just a little fountain something of significant size with a good amount of falling water. The extra natural moisture in the air makes the air smell better and is easier to breath, than simply recycled AC with a humidifier. It helps regulate the temp a little. Also lots of plants. And when people talk about good lighting use natural color balanced light, or more simply florescent fixtures known as grow lights. And make sure maintanence isn't allowed to cheap out on replacement bulbs later on and switch your staff back to cheap standard flourescent when bulbs get changed out. Or your hard work is for knot.

We use service based names and numbers. But I would love to switch to more fun names if for the only reason when we purchased ns3 to replace ns2, ns2 remained online for another year doing other duties before its end of life leaving me with ns1, ns3 and ns4. Names like this exist all over my workplace and renaming servers affects to many other things. But if I installed sleepy and threw away grumpy a year later the names still all look fine. The obsessive compulsive hates missing numbers in a series.

As a school IT staffer, we all live under budgets. Building from scratch concentrate on all the classrooms. Every room needs a sound system, projector and document camera if budget allows. If there is a larger amount of money then perhaps those smartboards everyone wants (though ours seem to go rather unused by the people who wanted them) Finally lots of network ports. Classrooms need enough network for each student to plug in a laptop or computer into copper or have PC's along the edges of the room, wireless no matter how good cannot handle 30 kids hitting something at the same time. While laptops seem cool, we still use PC's because of cost, laptops cost at least a third more than desktop pc's and last a couple years less. We have used several machines with 20 inch monitors so the students can work in a group which works quite well. However student computer use is coriculum driven and needs more teacher input.