This is EXACTLY my local solution at work. THe users abuse the shit out of FB if they have access to it (without even getting into the security issues).
Not to mention...my users are stupid. THey don't even know what a hosts file is, and coupled with the fact that I have the hosts entry in Group Policy which auto-updates every 15 minutes or so...it is a cheap and effective way to ditch FB & the horrible time drain that it is from the office.
What about the happy-to-be-alive law-abiding drivers that your texting and driving asshole kills in a massive auto wreck?
I don't give a fuck if some asshat who demands to excercise his ability to kill himself kills himself...it is the family of 5 he takes with him that pisses ME off.
This is the WORST possible argument one can give regarding the erosion of our rights.
It is never acceptable to give away our rights...regardless of whether we ever perceive we may need them. SHould I take away your right to free speech, because you don't speak about controversial topics? How about taking away your right to the free pratice of your religion? How about taking away your right to be secure in person & property...the government doesn't want my stuff, why should I care if they take away Joe's house?
For the love of god people...this shit is important to everyone. I can't believe anyone would say "Who cares?" when it comes to our rights & freedoms.
Lets start with, I don't know...the lack of the ability to do a PIN or Password based lock on the phone (before 2.2 hits).
That alone kills Android in our enterprise. I'm suprised that Android is acceptable in your fortune 500 company when anyone pretty much can directly access your corporate email if you lose your phone. Unless of course you're not connected to your corporate email, which from my standpoint makes the whole fucking point of having a smartphone useless, at least in the corporate sense.
The front facing camera is useless & I'll probably never use it. I do like the better rear-facing and LED flash, but it wasn't the killer for me...
I despised the speed of the 3g on iOS4 (and I was unsatisfied with performance for a while now, even before iOS4).
But what I NEEDED...was single-button preferably-on-bluetooth-headset voice-calling. I was needing to call people far too often while in-motion, and my local laws now forbid anything but one-button dialing. Yes, I could have had that by buying a new 3gs, but I chose to buy an iPhone4, mostly because I wanted the newer technology & I always have a case for my phones. Since the flaw on the iP4 is remediated by a case...I saw no reason to buy a year-old product instead of the new one.
"But when Steve said "You're holding it wrong", the preponderance of iPhone 4 owners said "Yes! YES! I am holding it wrong! It's my fault! Thank you sir, may I have another?""
type bullshit around here.
All but the absolute "Steve Jobs is God" wackjobs realize that Apple humped the dog HARD on the antenna design of the iPhone4.
Yet I still bought and have my iPhone4...and my decision was made post-antennagate.
Why? Because corporately I have two choices based on my organization's security principles...I can use a blackberry, which I once did, and which does, in actuality, lick balls. Yes, the "phone" part is excellent, and its a great email tool, but beyond that I find BB to be a giant steaming turd. Or I can use an iPhone. I had a iP3g, and the fucker lacked some features I needed that are present in the iP4. So I bought one.
Yes, antennagate is VERY real. I can kill the signal to my phone at home with one light finger touch. And I absolutely think that Apple fucked the dog, hard. But the case I got for free solves the issue in a pratical using-my-phone sense...and compared to using a BB, I'll gladly give Jobs & co my money.
Android, while having great potential, doesn't meat our corporate security policies yet. Once it does, I'll probably switch, mostly because of Antennagate and Apple fucking up. But until they get their security shit in order...its just not an option for me. (And, I'll also add, I'm in Canada...there are NO good Android based phones up here yet...they're all 2 year old turds).
But really...all us iPhone users aren't fucking sheep waiting for the next time for Jobs & co to fuck us in the ass. But I guess you get a nice big stiffy every time you think about us getting fucked by Jobs, and have to spout this same tired shit in every iPhone related discussion.
Burying any article/opinion just because you disagree with it is wrong. Worse, organizing large "gangs" of people who share your beliefs to bury stories against your beliefs is wrong.
Doesn't matter who is doing it. Just because this article discusses some right-leaners buring leftist stories, doesn't mean it doesn't happen the other way, and is just as wrong.
We're small business, but have the same policy....no support to iPhones (although I'm the IT Manager here & have an iPhone over the Blackberry).
In my 3 years working with BB devices, I ahve had numerous support tickets on BES/Blackberry related crap and people not getting their email. But I have NEVER had an email outage on my iPhone in 2 years of carrying a iP3g.
And don't forget in the USA, the iPhone is a single carrier too, whereas there are Android based phones on ALL the US carriers. 20 phones and every carrier vs 1 phone and 1 carrier. And they're only beating the iPhone by 4%.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not knocking Android either...there are some damn fine devices out there, and they deserve the marketshare they are gaining. But seriously, how much of the pillage of iPhone market share is due to people hating AT&T over hating the iPhone?
OK, I've come close to posting about 15 times while reading this, but this one finally got me...
"Of course we want people to consider the historical context and think for themselves whether the constitution is a good document for America to continue to follow, as that's a question we must continually ask."
I would argue that without the Constitution to follow, there is NO America.
We can argue till we're all blue in the face over what this word or that word or even what "is" means, but the bottom line is the Constitution & its amendments ARE America. If something is wrong, it needs to be changed, through the process granted under the constitution or, if the government truly has become corrupt, by armed revolt if necessary.
We have the right to question the founders, we have the right to question the law, the government, and yes, even the constitution itself, but we do NOT have the right to ignore it without overthrowing it & replacing it with something new, through process or force.
Because people (read, not us/.'ers) fucking LOVE Apple.
From our standpoint, they're far too propriatary, far too closed, and far to like Microsoft of 10-15 years ago. (and yes, I know we have another 5 million arguements of why Apple sucks beyond that)
From the general public's standpoint, they make shiny esteticly-pleasing gadgets that are relatively high-quality, durable, and have high resale values. They are easy to use, and most of the public don't care if someone is tightly controlling their user experience, because they LIKE the iDevice user experience.
I mean shit, how many of us don't use iPods as our portable MP3 players? If you have one, do you hate the device itself (forget the suckery of iTunes for a minute)?
Shit, I have an iPhone, and while I hate Apple's policies on the app store & the like, I bloody well love the phone/device itself (and thankfully I'm not in the USA so I don't have to fight the suckery of AT&T with it...I have no dropped calls, full tethering, etc).
I'm an IT Manager, but I'm very hand-s on as part of my position. So I can easily fill the role of whatever IT Skillset we need at any given moment.
Although, even then, my programming skills suck. I can build a relational database system complete with functions, triggers, etc as needed. I can setup and manage routers, VPN's, etc. I can handle the helpdesk...but if someone needed some C# written, I'd be fucked LOL.
Now, progress to my boss, who happens to be (as is most of the small/medium business corporate world) the Director of Finance. I cant pay off the bastard to look at my proposals, and even if he did he wouldn't fucking understand a thing. Same at the executive level...there are NO people understanding technology at that level, but they're making the budgetary and project decisions. THe only saving grace is (finally) they'll actually ask for my input (I'm still trying to get a seat at the big table for the strategic planning sessions so that some clueless executive doesn't promise undeliverable IT solutions).
I still hold and believe though that all this outsourcing will bite a ton of companies in the ass in the future though. I know in my own Relational Database world that from time to time a situational bug creeps into the code - I had one procedure that once went to hell because it was a leap year in code written 3 1/2 years prior to the incident. I was a rookie, and my date formula was wrong for leap years. But it didn't get discovered until the next leap year...and if I had been a lazy fuck that didn't document things properly, and had left the company...that bug could have crippled them at least for a little while. Outsorucing o the lowest bidder is just asking for a product that is likely to have a situational bug that won't be discovered immediately, and when it is the programmer will probably be all but unreachable.
Your public activities outside of work have always been fair game. If I wrote a letter to the local newspaper slamming my employer then I'd fully expect that to come back to me, why should a blog post about it be any different?
Its one thing if I sent a letter to my newspaper slamming the ABC Something Company. Its another entirely for me to go home and write on my wall "Fuck work sucked today".
But I'm willing to bet, should my employer utilize this service, that both would be considered equal.
Of course, it all depends on how this service works too. I have my facebook smacked with the highest privacy I can manage (basically, my public profile has a tasteful picture, the city I live in, and "request friend". Thats it. Now, if that service finds that much information, I could truely give two shits about the existance of this service.
But if their service can access my profile without being my friend...then this is a gross invasion of privacy, and thankfully here in Canada the notions of Privacy actually have some legislative teeth to them. Both FB and this company would be in a world of legal hurt (at least in Canada) if they're datamining and shipping out material that is not actually "public".
If you RTFA, you would see that they're trying to license for 3% of the wholesale value of the saws. Hardly half.
The tool makers are balking because they feel the customers will be put off by the pricetag....$69 every time the saw brake engages, and $110 a blade (+ 3% increase in the wholesale cost of the saw). That might be true too...but hey, if you invented something, you'd want to make money off it too. And this is actually an invention, not the usual patent troll crap we see here on/.
Security is not, and never will be a business need. It is an IT need. The Business, as an efficiently working machine, will never care.
But it is still YOUR responsibility as an IT professional to implement technology based on business need, but with business security tech built in/added on.
In other words, serve the business needs, and perform the necessary administration to keep it secure for them. And if they're too stupid to understand that you're doing your job in keeping it secure & ignore your warnings, find a better job.
And not trying to start a war, but that attitude is exactly what is wrong with IT today.
Yes, we have to make sure everything is secure, obviously. But what you describe, the "Follow IT's rules or go find another job" is fucking stupid, and only encourages the Shadow IT in an organization who, without training or knowledge that we have, are liable to open up security issues that we don't even know about now, because they're hiding it all from us.
In my opinion, I agree with TFA completely, in that IT is no longer the Preventer of Information Services and slave to the end user...BUT...it is our duty to provide the business with the tools and education they need to efficiently perform their job role.
In other words...we're the fuckers driving the business, but we serve the business, not the user. By serving the business, our users are no longer our customers, they're our peers, helping us drive their efficiency and ultimately driving the business.
I dont "sell" my programming/etc to the users here. I write code which enables the business to be more efficient, and have better tools available to the end user than what they had before. Anybody that doesn't get that in IT is on a path to future failure.
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Whomever modded this "offtopic" is full of fail.
This is EXACTLY my local solution at work. THe users abuse the shit out of FB if they have access to it (without even getting into the security issues).
Not to mention...my users are stupid. THey don't even know what a hosts file is, and coupled with the fact that I have the hosts entry in Group Policy which auto-updates every 15 minutes or so...it is a cheap and effective way to ditch FB & the horrible time drain that it is from the office.
What about the happy-to-be-alive law-abiding drivers that your texting and driving asshole kills in a massive auto wreck?
I don't give a fuck if some asshat who demands to excercise his ability to kill himself kills himself...it is the family of 5 he takes with him that pisses ME off.
If I had to guess, its that a Christian mod took offense to "Jebus".
Posting not-AC, so that I'm not mistaken for the Christian mod who doesn't find the Jebus joke funny.
This is the WORST possible argument one can give regarding the erosion of our rights.
It is never acceptable to give away our rights...regardless of whether we ever perceive we may need them. SHould I take away your right to free speech, because you don't speak about controversial topics? How about taking away your right to the free pratice of your religion? How about taking away your right to be secure in person & property...the government doesn't want my stuff, why should I care if they take away Joe's house?
For the love of god people...this shit is important to everyone. I can't believe anyone would say "Who cares?" when it comes to our rights & freedoms.
Lets start with, I don't know...the lack of the ability to do a PIN or Password based lock on the phone (before 2.2 hits).
That alone kills Android in our enterprise. I'm suprised that Android is acceptable in your fortune 500 company when anyone pretty much can directly access your corporate email if you lose your phone. Unless of course you're not connected to your corporate email, which from my standpoint makes the whole fucking point of having a smartphone useless, at least in the corporate sense.
I didn't have a 3gs, but an old-school 3g.
The front facing camera is useless & I'll probably never use it. I do like the better rear-facing and LED flash, but it wasn't the killer for me...
I despised the speed of the 3g on iOS4 (and I was unsatisfied with performance for a while now, even before iOS4).
But what I NEEDED...was single-button preferably-on-bluetooth-headset voice-calling. I was needing to call people far too often while in-motion, and my local laws now forbid anything but one-button dialing. Yes, I could have had that by buying a new 3gs, but I chose to buy an iPhone4, mostly because I wanted the newer technology & I always have a case for my phones. Since the flaw on the iP4 is remediated by a case...I saw no reason to buy a year-old product instead of the new one.
Sorry, but I'm getting fucking sick of the:
"But when Steve said "You're holding it wrong", the preponderance of iPhone 4 owners said "Yes! YES! I am holding it wrong! It's my fault! Thank you sir, may I have another?""
type bullshit around here.
All but the absolute "Steve Jobs is God" wackjobs realize that Apple humped the dog HARD on the antenna design of the iPhone4.
Yet I still bought and have my iPhone4...and my decision was made post-antennagate.
Why? Because corporately I have two choices based on my organization's security principles...I can use a blackberry, which I once did, and which does, in actuality, lick balls. Yes, the "phone" part is excellent, and its a great email tool, but beyond that I find BB to be a giant steaming turd. Or I can use an iPhone. I had a iP3g, and the fucker lacked some features I needed that are present in the iP4. So I bought one.
Yes, antennagate is VERY real. I can kill the signal to my phone at home with one light finger touch. And I absolutely think that Apple fucked the dog, hard. But the case I got for free solves the issue in a pratical using-my-phone sense...and compared to using a BB, I'll gladly give Jobs & co my money.
Android, while having great potential, doesn't meat our corporate security policies yet. Once it does, I'll probably switch, mostly because of Antennagate and Apple fucking up. But until they get their security shit in order...its just not an option for me. (And, I'll also add, I'm in Canada...there are NO good Android based phones up here yet...they're all 2 year old turds).
But really...all us iPhone users aren't fucking sheep waiting for the next time for Jobs & co to fuck us in the ass. But I guess you get a nice big stiffy every time you think about us getting fucked by Jobs, and have to spout this same tired shit in every iPhone related discussion.
THis is the one thing that at least has me tempted to jailbreak my iPhone.
Beyond that...there's nothing on the "Unapproved App Store" that I remotely give a shit about. But thats just me.
No.
Burying any article/opinion just because you disagree with it is wrong. Worse, organizing large "gangs" of people who share your beliefs to bury stories against your beliefs is wrong.
Doesn't matter who is doing it. Just because this article discusses some right-leaners buring leftist stories, doesn't mean it doesn't happen the other way, and is just as wrong.
We're small business, but have the same policy....no support to iPhones (although I'm the IT Manager here & have an iPhone over the Blackberry). In my 3 years working with BB devices, I ahve had numerous support tickets on BES/Blackberry related crap and people not getting their email. But I have NEVER had an email outage on my iPhone in 2 years of carrying a iP3g.
And don't forget in the USA, the iPhone is a single carrier too, whereas there are Android based phones on ALL the US carriers. 20 phones and every carrier vs 1 phone and 1 carrier. And they're only beating the iPhone by 4%. Don't get me wrong, I'm not knocking Android either...there are some damn fine devices out there, and they deserve the marketshare they are gaining. But seriously, how much of the pillage of iPhone market share is due to people hating AT&T over hating the iPhone?
Soon enough it is going to be Pass/Fail only.
Why bother with grades at all...either you suck, or you don't. THats at least what these educators seem to be getting to.
OK, I've come close to posting about 15 times while reading this, but this one finally got me...
"Of course we want people to consider the historical context and think for themselves whether the constitution is a good document for America to continue to follow, as that's a question we must continually ask."
I would argue that without the Constitution to follow, there is NO America.
We can argue till we're all blue in the face over what this word or that word or even what "is" means, but the bottom line is the Constitution & its amendments ARE America. If something is wrong, it needs to be changed, through the process granted under the constitution or, if the government truly has become corrupt, by armed revolt if necessary.
We have the right to question the founders, we have the right to question the law, the government, and yes, even the constitution itself, but we do NOT have the right to ignore it without overthrowing it & replacing it with something new, through process or force.
Because people (read, not us /.'ers) fucking LOVE Apple.
From our standpoint, they're far too propriatary, far too closed, and far to like Microsoft of 10-15 years ago. (and yes, I know we have another 5 million arguements of why Apple sucks beyond that)
From the general public's standpoint, they make shiny esteticly-pleasing gadgets that are relatively high-quality, durable, and have high resale values. They are easy to use, and most of the public don't care if someone is tightly controlling their user experience, because they LIKE the iDevice user experience.
I mean shit, how many of us don't use iPods as our portable MP3 players? If you have one, do you hate the device itself (forget the suckery of iTunes for a minute)?
Shit, I have an iPhone, and while I hate Apple's policies on the app store & the like, I bloody well love the phone/device itself (and thankfully I'm not in the USA so I don't have to fight the suckery of AT&T with it...I have no dropped calls, full tethering, etc).
I do :(
I hate my tape system with every ounce of my being. But for the time being, I'm stuck with it.
The thing is, this is probably more a more likely scenario for finding intelligent life than SETI could hope to accomplish.
Um, Nicotine is a nurotoxin with a toxicity of .5-1mg/kg in human beings. Far from "harmless"
I agree with you completely.
I'm an IT Manager, but I'm very hand-s on as part of my position. So I can easily fill the role of whatever IT Skillset we need at any given moment.
Although, even then, my programming skills suck. I can build a relational database system complete with functions, triggers, etc as needed. I can setup and manage routers, VPN's, etc. I can handle the helpdesk...but if someone needed some C# written, I'd be fucked LOL.
Now, progress to my boss, who happens to be (as is most of the small/medium business corporate world) the Director of Finance. I cant pay off the bastard to look at my proposals, and even if he did he wouldn't fucking understand a thing. Same at the executive level...there are NO people understanding technology at that level, but they're making the budgetary and project decisions. THe only saving grace is (finally) they'll actually ask for my input (I'm still trying to get a seat at the big table for the strategic planning sessions so that some clueless executive doesn't promise undeliverable IT solutions).
I still hold and believe though that all this outsourcing will bite a ton of companies in the ass in the future though. I know in my own Relational Database world that from time to time a situational bug creeps into the code - I had one procedure that once went to hell because it was a leap year in code written 3 1/2 years prior to the incident. I was a rookie, and my date formula was wrong for leap years. But it didn't get discovered until the next leap year...and if I had been a lazy fuck that didn't document things properly, and had left the company...that bug could have crippled them at least for a little while. Outsorucing o the lowest bidder is just asking for a product that is likely to have a situational bug that won't be discovered immediately, and when it is the programmer will probably be all but unreachable.
Its one thing if I sent a letter to my newspaper slamming the ABC Something Company. Its another entirely for me to go home and write on my wall "Fuck work sucked today".
But I'm willing to bet, should my employer utilize this service, that both would be considered equal.
Of course, it all depends on how this service works too. I have my facebook smacked with the highest privacy I can manage (basically, my public profile has a tasteful picture, the city I live in, and "request friend". Thats it. Now, if that service finds that much information, I could truely give two shits about the existance of this service.
But if their service can access my profile without being my friend...then this is a gross invasion of privacy, and thankfully here in Canada the notions of Privacy actually have some legislative teeth to them. Both FB and this company would be in a world of legal hurt (at least in Canada) if they're datamining and shipping out material that is not actually "public".
If you RTFA, you would see that they're trying to license for 3% of the wholesale value of the saws. Hardly half.
The tool makers are balking because they feel the customers will be put off by the pricetag....$69 every time the saw brake engages, and $110 a blade (+ 3% increase in the wholesale cost of the saw). That might be true too...but hey, if you invented something, you'd want to make money off it too. And this is actually an invention, not the usual patent troll crap we see here on /.
I'm not a total iFan, but my iDevice is not castrated in any way. You can thank AT&T for that, NOT Apple.
My Rogers-based iPhone (Canada) tethers perfectly.
-30C? Sounds downright balmy compared to Canada.
No No NO.
Security is not, and never will be a business need. It is an IT need. The Business, as an efficiently working machine, will never care.
But it is still YOUR responsibility as an IT professional to implement technology based on business need, but with business security tech built in/added on.
In other words, serve the business needs, and perform the necessary administration to keep it secure for them. And if they're too stupid to understand that you're doing your job in keeping it secure & ignore your warnings, find a better job.
Not posting anonymously...
And not trying to start a war, but that attitude is exactly what is wrong with IT today.
Yes, we have to make sure everything is secure, obviously. But what you describe, the "Follow IT's rules or go find another job" is fucking stupid, and only encourages the Shadow IT in an organization who, without training or knowledge that we have, are liable to open up security issues that we don't even know about now, because they're hiding it all from us.
In my opinion, I agree with TFA completely, in that IT is no longer the Preventer of Information Services and slave to the end user...BUT...it is our duty to provide the business with the tools and education they need to efficiently perform their job role.
In other words...we're the fuckers driving the business, but we serve the business, not the user. By serving the business, our users are no longer our customers, they're our peers, helping us drive their efficiency and ultimately driving the business.
I dont "sell" my programming/etc to the users here. I write code which enables the business to be more efficient, and have better tools available to the end user than what they had before. Anybody that doesn't get that in IT is on a path to future failure.
Fuck you ain't kidding. We had ~500 computers with that little fault in the organization.
The retarded jet-engine fan noise that accompanied the failures was cool though.