Searching For Alien to Cost School System $1 Million

It costs $1 million to uninstall some screensavers? That’s some crazy inflation they have in East Valley.

I can’t help but wonder if there isn’t something else going on here.

Wait a minute, is she talking about getting a private company to do maintenance on 5,000 computers with a service fee of $200 each? Wow, I hope she doesn’t plan on buying any cheap plots of land in Florida anytime soon.

“Birdwell said it will take more than $1 million to fix the problem, including removal of the SETI software.”

What problem did SETI cause that there is more to it then uninstalling it? I’m guessing it has more to do with the PCs that have not been replaced since 2000.

I wonder how much Supt. Birdwell makes per year.

Wear and tear? Using a computer once it’s on makes very little difference to its life span. It’s the switching it on and off in the first place that accounts for most of it.

This version makes a little more sense:

http://education.zdnet.com/?p=3408

i was pretty ticked about this until i read the whole story….

http://www.geek.com/articles/news/setihome-god-fired-for-costing-schoo l-district-1-6-million-2009123/

LOL this guy has some iron cajones…

Thanks maddogyp, that article actually does shed alot more light onto the situation. But I’d still like to know where the hell they get this $1.6 million figure from. Even if you account for the extra “super computers” and electricity to run PCs 24/7, the figure seems way too high.

Video Game Dork – Thermal expansion and contraction is the commonest cause of failure of most electronic equipment – turning it on and off is what makes it warm up and cool down. There are also very small scale effects within chips – I wish I could find the New Scientist article but I can’t.

A CPU on standyby does not use as much power as one running at 100%. A CPU running at 100% causes the fan to run almost constantly. Fan failure is a very common source of mechanical failure.

I work IT in a school system and I think I can provide a little perspective. If you read the expanded articles this guy did and did not do a lot of things he should have and should not have. That being said the $1 million figure, like others have said, is for the overall consumption of resources. Obviously, most people do not think of how much the cost to run 5000 computers would be when they should be off. That being said, since this guy was a sysadmin he could have easily set the systems to power on and run at times they shouldn’t have been on.

Also, there are a lot of school systems who have to hire outside consultants to do IT work because they do not pay someone on staff. Considering this system just fired an IT admin they may have to hire someone to do this and if it’s a consulting group then they are going to pay out the nose.

Some factors one must consider:

1. Heat-regardless of whether a PC is ‘idle’ or ‘active’ it’s on and producing heat from the power supply, the processor, the hard drive etc. This can cause any number of failures if there are already faulty or failing parts in the PC. We have had faulty capacitors on certain models which fail faster if the computer is left on to get hot all the time.

2. General wear and tear-if it’s on there are parts moving and moving parts only last so long.

3. Expected replacement time table-Schools often use their computers way longer then the average public consumer. They simply cannot afford to upgrade every three years. Sometimes PCs will be used upwards of nine years and then re-purposed for another task. If these machines were being used more/more intensely then the expected life span is diminished.

4. Replacement Cost-Even when schools can buy in bulk at a discount the cost buying a large number of computers is very expensive. Large scale replacement costs in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

5. Stolen equipment and time-they have to replace that and they’ve paid him for not doing his job

Link to the story in the local paper: http://www.eastvalleytribune.com/story/147955