Fairfax County School Board Adopts FY 2011 Approved Budget

Fairfax County School Board Adopts FY 2011 Approved Budget

The Fairfax County School Board has adopted the Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS) FY 2011 approved budget of $2.2 billion, which establishes new fees for athletic participation and for Advanced Placement (AP) and International Baccalaureate (IB) tests; eliminates more than 200 positions, nearly half of which are from central office support; freezes all employee salaries for the second consecutive year; and creates a three-year priority schools pilot program that designates 30 schools to receive special staff support and financial support to help improve student achievement. 

[FCPS News Releases]

At Least They Didn't Include iFart...

This blog post is for week 5 of RIT’s Human Communication course.

I found this comic online a few days ago and thought I’d share it:

Being in a Human Communication class, this made perfect sense to put on my blog (even though I only found it through StumbleUpon). As you can probably tell, it plays off of the connectedness that many people feel must be present in order to rationally communicate with others. Through the use of social media sites and technology, we have become more “connected” with each other on a certain level that hasn’t been seen in the past. The depth of the interactions we have online, however, seems to be quite different. Many people on Facebook, Twitter, etc. share the type of information shown in the comic and may feel they have an intimate bond with others they talk to online. Does this really mean we’re great friends with those people though? Sharing these types of extraneous physical ideas is a much different beast than sharing actual personal feelings, which is viewed more as what people did in the past. Is there a paradigm shift happening here in the way and manners people communicate? It certainly is happening as far as platform – phone, email, letters, etc. – is concerned.

Communication in Work Environments

This blog post is for week 4 of RIT’s Human Communication course.

As I have found out even more extensively these past couple weeks, communication in workplace environments is just as important as with those you live with. I recently started working in a customer-service IT environment, where our team receives tickets about computer and network problems that clients are experiencing. Communication is one of the most important things to be able to do (after fixing computers), since the tickets that we receive have already gone through a third party. Once we receive them, an analysis and break-down of the contents must be done in order to procure any questions or comments which we may have about the user’s problem(s). After that, a prompt response to the client would be in order, to see if we would be able to help over the phone, which would require clear verbal communication in order for the person on the other end of the line to understand the technical support person.

Communication between co-workers and clients is very different in some of these respects. When talking to the user with the computer problems, the communication (most likely) has to be very formal and easy to follow, as one may be issuing directions over the phone for the other person. However, when communicating with co-workers you can be relaxed, say things on your mind, and in general be more laid-back than with the person you’re helping. It’s important to customer service representatives to be able to differentiate between these two times, and make the right decisions for the language to use in the situation. Delays and hiccups in this process can create strain and stress, and ultimately costs the organization money.

Reference:
http://www.nextlevel-consulting.com/articles/management/article06.html

New Sun Ray Licensing Scheme

This is a re-posting of an email a colleague of mine sent, expressing his dismay over the new licensing scheme Oracle seems to have adopted for the Sun Ray product line:

If this blog post is correct and I'm reading it correctly:

By "simplifying" licensing, Oracle just made it minimally no different and maximally much more expensive by moving to the same model Microsoft uses for Terminal Services licensing.  I've often shared that one of the benefits of the Sun Rays is the ability to deploy many DTUs but only size as many servers and buy as many licenses as would be needed for concurrent usage, versus the expensive Microsoft model of per user or device, but it seems I can't completely do that anymore!  Yes you can still size for concurrent usage, but you have to pay for unused DTUs.  I liked the 1 license per concurrent user model.  We have 200ish Sun Rays for potentially 2000 users but have not observed more than 50 concurrent users.  All Sun Rays are used at some point or other during the day; that's the nature of a deployment in an educational institution.  Under the old scheme we only needed 50 licenses, whereas under the new scheme we would have to opt for 200 device licenses or 2000 user licenses.  As it were, we acquired each Sun Ray with its own license so that we could have max utilization without worrying about going over our license count, but that was before we knew how low actual concurrent usage would be.  We were subsequently planning to allow SDAC usage and possibly acquire additional hardware Sun Rays without purchasing additional licenses until we hit 200 concurrent users, but based on the above blog post it sounds like we would need to purchase additional "device" licenses because SDACs count as devices independent of hardware Sun Rays.  From another perspective, if we purchase no additional licenses, for each SDAC we deploy, we would have to undeploy a physical Sun Ray.

Thanks Oracle (sarcastic).  You can take that as customer feedback on a public forum.  Please don't continue to take away my reasons for being an unpaid advocate of Sun products (see http://wyang0.blogspot.com/2010/03/long-term-investment-or-solaris-is.html for my thoughts on the changes to Solaris licensing).

I hope someone can tell me that at least the existing licenses we have are valid under the old terms and only new licenses are subject to the new "simple" licensing scheme?

As a sidenote, I find it ironic that it was called "simpler" in the blog post, yet the blogger apparently needed some help to understand it first.

William Yang

Perhaps this will be marketable for them for broader markets, but places like TJHSST and many education environments will be squeezed to find an extra reason to use Sun Rays over other desktop alternatives due to licensing.

Remembering April Fools Day 2010

No one day can be a “perfect” day, where everything can be made into a joke and laughed off. As we celebrate this April Fools day with Google and Johns Hopkins University receiving new names and other pranks happening, we also must remember those who helped get us where we are now. Ed Roberts, one of these unknown pioneers, passed away from pneumonia today. While he may be relatively unknown, his impact on the digital world is still being felt. “Ed Roberts was the founder of MITS (Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems) and inventor of the Altair 8800, widely credited as the world’s first personal computer. It was featured on the cover of Popular Electronics in 1975, when Paul Allen and Bill Gates contacted Roberts and offered to write software for the machine. Gates and Allen worked with MITS in Albuquerque, NM, and started Microsoft. In 1977, Roberts sold MITS and retired to Georgia where he studied medicine and became a small-town doctor.” [1]

After Gates and Allen had written software for the Intel 8008 microprocessor, they contacted Roberts in order to run a BASIC interpreter. “On July 22, 1975 MITS signed a contract for the Altair BASIC with Bill Gates and Paul Allen. They received $3000 at signing and a royalty for each copy of BASIC sold with a cap of $180,000.” [2] While Gates and Allen were given a meager start, they were on their way to creating the largest software company in US history to this day. This stepping stone of joining both software and hardware has helped bring us to where we are now – palm-sized computer devices you can carry anywhere with performance doubling every other year, and with which you can communicate with anyone around the world. For this we remember where we came from, and are grateful.

Emergency Communication and Preparedness

This blog post is for week 3 of RIT’s Human Communication course.

As was widely reported on local Rochester news and to the school body on March 17th, a '”[possibly] armed individual [came] on campus”, and directions were given to recipients of the RIT Alert system:

Armed Intruder R.I.T. Alert! Take Cover. Posssible Armed suicidal person on campus. Go into nearest room. Lock or barricade the door. Follow instructions from authorities.

After the initial message was sent out via email and text message, students and others wishing to receive information about what happened went to the RIT website, which links to a page specifically for providing information during emergencies. However, to the dismay of those wanting this information, the page was useless, as no information had been posted. Nothing would be posted on that website until an hour or two after the event was over, in fact. During the time of the “armed intruder alert”, the school would only send out messages via the RIT Alert system, which presented problems of its own: the warning message would be sent out more than once to some people, and others wouldn’t get it at all. Some reports say that a subset of individuals received the messages, but were delayed for an hour or two. The system seems to have overloaded with the amount of traffic that was required to send out all of the messages, and so many were left in the dark.

After discovering the relative lack of information from RIT, many students turned to social networking websites, like Twitter and Facebook, in order to gather information about the current events. Through these mediums, students were able to communicate to others closer to where the events were occurring, and perhaps were able to gather more information. Some of this information was false or untrue, though. Part way through the events, a rumor surfaced starting on Twitter that there were ambulances and two dead people over by the Colony Manor apartments. While there may have been ambulances, the poster of the message on Twitter later apologized for the misinformation in order to dispel his prior statement. The power of these social media websites meant that simply making a clarification wasn’t enough; by the time the update was posted, the rumor had spread to a large number of students who were still awake at the hour, and was not immediately stopped.

The events of the 17th highlight the power of social networking sites and show the speed that news can travel when an important event has occurred. RIT has said they will be reviewing their protocols for mass notification, and will be taking steps to better inform the community, which would be much appreciated.

Integral Techniques to Keeping Interest

This is my blog post for Human Communication, week 2

Over the past few years I have been an avid listener of podcasts, especially regarding technology – Microsoft, Apple, Google, and other technology news that comes up week-to-week. The art of communication within podcasts and online audio is accentuated, as the listener is only focusing with one sense – the ears. With this limited scope of attention, the people speaking on the audio have no way to convey body motions or visual queues, so the only real way to convey motion is through the voice. The problem with this is when you’re attempting to listen to a person who is either tired and bored, or just has a monotone voice and isn’t interesting. I find myself tuning the audio out, and concentrating on the other three things I might be working on. 10 minutes later I’ll remember I was listening to something, and have absolutely no idea what happened during that last 10 minutes. The voice that doesn’t carry any emotion doesn’t have the qualities that would portray integral techniques of human communication in order to keep someone listening.

As podcasts have started evolving to include video, new problems may occur due to positioning of the camera, facial expressions, and a combination of other variables. On one of the latest video podcasts I’ve been watching, the camera for one of the two hosts is pointed at an odd angle up at his face, which only makes wrinkles and “pockets” under the eyes even more visible. The lack of facial movement or reaction to other things being said add to the dreariness of the show, and makes the listener/watcher have less interest in the show. I would think that camera positioning, “awakeness”, and emotion are just some of the things needed in order to make a successful audio or video presentation.