You're the one that's out of line here. Even if you do know what you're doing in setting this up and getting it to work, you're intruding on IT's job. Would you be OK with it if out of the blue IT decided to setup their own X-Ray machine or MRI? Even if they told you that they "took all the necessary precautions"?
At the base level, this is not about your ability to run a server, competently or otherwise. It's about IT being responsible for the IT infrastructure. They don't know how competent you are, they don't know whether you'll keep it patched or up and running properly, but they know they'll damn sure get the blame if you do not. If you're IT shop is incompetent or inflexible, this is an issue to "send up the chain", but don't expect to be treated with respect if you go rogue.
You know what though? It's time to stop letting user get a free pass with crap like this. They've been told. Don't follow unknown links you get in emails. Don't reply to emails asking for sensitive information. Don't give the dude who cold-called you your password. But they still keep doing this crap.
If someone calls me up out of the blue and wants to know the schedules for building security, and the locations of all the security camera's, and I give it to them, I'm responsible. If someone backs a truck up to the loading dock saying they need to take all the office furniture in for a monthly cleaning and I open the dock door for and help them load it all up, I'm responsible. If someone asks me to provide them with information on all of my businesses customers, and I give it to them, I'm responsible. I'm fired, I'm possibly fined, I maybe even go to jail. Why does it suddenly become an "Oopsie" when there's a computer involved? It's Two thousand and fucking eleven already. These people have been using computers at their job daily for the better part of a decade in most cases by now. They know better, and if they really don't, then they need to hurry up and learn, or face the consequences.
That users are children. They lie, they don't listen, they ignore your advice, they actively look for ways to get around the measures you put in place for their benefit, and at the end of the day, when the users have done something galactically stupid, IT'S ALL YOUR FAULT!
Look, we told them we had to program an autonomous artificial intelligence agent to proactively scan cyberspace for hackers looking to bypass the firewall using port cross-scripting. They bought it, don't screw this up for us.
Why do video games have to reach some mythical, arbitrary level of artistic worth? "Hey, that's a great game that's fun to play, but....oh, it's not a 200 year old painting of nude fat women. Sorry, it's worth less now on the Society Scorecard".
Get over it already. So some people think video games aren't art. Hell, so what if 99% of the world feels this way. So fucking what? Dickens wasn't writing to make art, he was writing to entertain and sell a product. Michelangelo created David because someone paid him to do so. In another 100 years people may start really feeling this way about video games....or maybe they won't. In the end, it doesn't make a shit bit of difference. Play video games, enjoy them. Stop worrying what other people think about them.
Far too often, however, the problem comes not in whether you can properly educate your users/punish them for non-compliance, but whether you, as an IT entity, have the power to do so. If you do, awesome, but if you don't have the favor of the high muckity-mucks, phrases like "3 strikes" are going to get you stricken from the payroll records. This is particularly a problem in educational or medical environments, where profs/docs rule the roost, have for years, and aren't particularly interested in you coming in and changing things.
The point being, you sometimes have to pick your battles. A device like this is potentially a good way to avoid a particularly nasty battle, if it allows for increased security without having to constantly berate the people who have the ear of your CEO/Board of Directors/Dean.
Are just plain evil to begin with. Broadcom, Intel, HP, Dell, whomever it comes from, I've yet to encounter one that didn't interfere with the normal function of the computer in some way.
I'm sure all my friends will be happy to know that Mark, Jason, and Princess (or Ace, Dirk, and Agatha, depending on when you were born) enjoy Boulevard Beer. Maybe I'll mix it up and see if Boxy Brown might recommend Mafia Wars or something.
...chime in please. It seems like the solution to this is potentially all user-side, and controllable? Adjust the buffers in your devices if you can, or perhaps find a way to reduce the TCP buffer in your modern operating system?
...speed dial with enough memory to store ten numbers...
Whoa whoa whoa....what now? What's all this fancy schmancy wizardry again? I'm expected to remember some arcane, complicated button combination simply to dial a phone number? It's always the same: you get something working just the way you want it, and some damn hot-shot wiz kid has to come along and make screw it all up.
It's XBox all over again. They'll lose several billion on WP7 and write it off. WP8 will come out and after three years of shoving the platform down people's throats, they'll be a hard won 25% of the market. Don't get me wrong, I own an XBox 360 but how many years of mistakes did it take for them and how much did they lose on the original to come to that piece of market share?
This is exactly spot on. There will be enough integration and management benefits that businesses will (eventually) begin to migrate to it for corporate needs, more and more consumers will be talked into it by Verizon reps, and eventually they'll gain a foothold. Microsoft really doesn't have any other choice but to stick with it, and to take a beating with it early if necessary. Plan B is to just be a complete non-factor - or worse, non-participant - in the mobile world.
- You need to have some very frank discussions with either your Dell rep, or whomever is speccing out your quotes. $1k for corporate-level desktop PC in this day and age is ridiculous; you should be expecting to pay more like $600-700. To give you an idea, I work for a state university, and we're currently giving about $550 for a Core2 E8400/4Gig Ram/160gig HD HP. Integrated video and no monitor of course, but a 3 year warranty. Sure you're not going to be decoding the human genome with that machine but it's more than enough for your average office worker. Don't be afraid to use HP as a club against your Dell rep; they're currently getting hammered by HP in the corporate world, and won't want to lose your account, assuming you're of any kind of size. I wouldn't recommend going to HP unless you absolutely have to though; service is horrible.
- Take some time to consider whether the time spent building custom machines is really worth the time of whomever would be doing it. Chances are, it is not. Either you're going to have someone making peanuts doing the work, or a skilled IT person who really isn't all that interested in doing what essentially is grunt work. In either case, you're going to see problems.
- If you haven't already, you should discuss this with your purchasing department before moving forward. Depending on the level of beauracracy that is entrenched in your level of government, building your own computers may not even be permissable.
You mentioned that you couldn't find anyone doing this on a large scale, this should be a warning flag. Lot of potential problems and pitfalls here, not the least of which is your cunning "transfer the OEM licenses" plan. There are a lot of better ways to save money on computer purchases.
Because it's Saturday, and we don't have anything else to get upset about! WE HAVE TO HAVE SOMETHING TO GET UPSET ABOUT, DON'T YOU UNDERSTAND?! How can I be expected to face the day if I'm not pissed off about something that doesn't directly affect me in any meaningful way?
Also a sure fire 100% guaranteed way to get modded into oblivion I'm sure, but whatever. I just have to ask though: Who the fuck is pirating a Uwe Boll movie? You deserve to get sued morons.
There are so many weird and wonderful new things online. Just look at all the stuff that's being produced, from song parodies to music video parodies to fan films and the like. The impetus never went away, it's just not channeled through his show. As a case in point, MST3K. Had a great run, died a horrible death on the Skiffy Channel. Resurrected in the form of Cinematic Titanic and Rifftrax. They both seem to be making money doing what they're doing. I just get a kick out of hearing Tom Servo's voice riffing on new, crappy movies. I only wish Trace was working on that project, too. Mike I could do without -- I'm still hoping Joel comes back. (Give it up, man. Yeah, I know.)
It seems like a guy like Demento could have at one point (and perhaps still can) made a good living/impact by embracing this new media/outlet, having a website/show/podcast that specialized in highlighting new stuff in this vein, along with whatever original content they still wanted to do. As the other reply pointed out though, old school media guy, probably just never occurred to him.
Reading through his website announcements there is like a timeline of and old school radio guy dying. I'm not going to pretend I'm a big Demento fan, but still kind of sad. We're closing up, we're losing money. We got only 100 orders for a last ditch money making idea. We're clearly being hurt by the decline of CD sales. We can't fill orders because we're working with Yahoo Small Business for some reason.
Just out of curiosity, why the hell is going online/podcast a last-last ditch effort for this guy? He's got a name recognition that would draw people in, and the format would seem to work well for podcasting. At the very least a podcast could drive people to his website and help him sell a few CD's/tshirts. I get he's an old school guy and up until recently still had a terrestrial broadcast to do, but you'd think someone would have come to them at some point and suggested this.
But yeah, go buy yourself a good Powershell book. Assuming your environment is running XP at least, pushing out support for it is pretty much just an MSI install. Week or two playing around with it, and chances are you'll have a script that runs circles around your old one.
Several large advertising companies... including Google Inc.'s DoubleClick and Yahoo Inc.'s Right Media, said they were unaware of the data being sent to them from the social-networking sites, and said they haven't made use of it.
So major online advertising companies, who make their living analyzing data from server logs, who at a moments notice can tell you the click-through rate of any ad they currently have in rotation, who study the eye movements of users while using computers to design more effective ads, who have taken a medium where content is by and large free and found a way to make money off it, didn't notice they were being sent usernames and ID #'s that were tied to the click-throughs on some of their ads.
Yeah I have to agree with this, came here to say the same thing. Benchmarks have their uses, but chances are the real world difference between similarly-built machines is not going to be significant. Let's be honest here: Unless you're doing a roll-out to a bunch of coders or CIA Photoshop experts, chances are most of these PC's are going to be running a web browser, a groupware client, and a document/spreadsheet editor like 75% of the time.
Choosing a PC vendor based on price, reliability, and service is going to be far more useful and have a far greater RIO than picking the one that scored 5 points higher on 3DMark or whatever. There have to be much better uses of your time.
Slashdot Mirror
See what happens.
You're the one that's out of line here. Even if you do know what you're doing in setting this up and getting it to work, you're intruding on IT's job. Would you be OK with it if out of the blue IT decided to setup their own X-Ray machine or MRI? Even if they told you that they "took all the necessary precautions"?
At the base level, this is not about your ability to run a server, competently or otherwise. It's about IT being responsible for the IT infrastructure. They don't know how competent you are, they don't know whether you'll keep it patched or up and running properly, but they know they'll damn sure get the blame if you do not. If you're IT shop is incompetent or inflexible, this is an issue to "send up the chain", but don't expect to be treated with respect if you go rogue.
You know what though? It's time to stop letting user get a free pass with crap like this. They've been told. Don't follow unknown links you get in emails. Don't reply to emails asking for sensitive information. Don't give the dude who cold-called you your password. But they still keep doing this crap.
If someone calls me up out of the blue and wants to know the schedules for building security, and the locations of all the security camera's, and I give it to them, I'm responsible. If someone backs a truck up to the loading dock saying they need to take all the office furniture in for a monthly cleaning and I open the dock door for and help them load it all up, I'm responsible. If someone asks me to provide them with information on all of my businesses customers, and I give it to them, I'm responsible. I'm fired, I'm possibly fined, I maybe even go to jail. Why does it suddenly become an "Oopsie" when there's a computer involved? It's Two thousand and fucking eleven already. These people have been using computers at their job daily for the better part of a decade in most cases by now. They know better, and if they really don't, then they need to hurry up and learn, or face the consequences.
That users are children. They lie, they don't listen, they ignore your advice, they actively look for ways to get around the measures you put in place for their benefit, and at the end of the day, when the users have done something galactically stupid, IT'S ALL YOUR FAULT!
Your users are children. Treat them as such.
Look, we told them we had to program an autonomous artificial intelligence agent to proactively scan cyberspace for hackers looking to bypass the firewall using port cross-scripting. They bought it, don't screw this up for us.
Why do video games have to reach some mythical, arbitrary level of artistic worth? "Hey, that's a great game that's fun to play, but....oh, it's not a 200 year old painting of nude fat women. Sorry, it's worth less now on the Society Scorecard".
Get over it already. So some people think video games aren't art. Hell, so what if 99% of the world feels this way. So fucking what? Dickens wasn't writing to make art, he was writing to entertain and sell a product. Michelangelo created David because someone paid him to do so. In another 100 years people may start really feeling this way about video games....or maybe they won't. In the end, it doesn't make a shit bit of difference. Play video games, enjoy them. Stop worrying what other people think about them.
Far too often, however, the problem comes not in whether you can properly educate your users/punish them for non-compliance, but whether you, as an IT entity, have the power to do so. If you do, awesome, but if you don't have the favor of the high muckity-mucks, phrases like "3 strikes" are going to get you stricken from the payroll records. This is particularly a problem in educational or medical environments, where profs/docs rule the roost, have for years, and aren't particularly interested in you coming in and changing things.
The point being, you sometimes have to pick your battles. A device like this is potentially a good way to avoid a particularly nasty battle, if it allows for increased security without having to constantly berate the people who have the ear of your CEO/Board of Directors/Dean.
Are just plain evil to begin with. Broadcom, Intel, HP, Dell, whomever it comes from, I've yet to encounter one that didn't interfere with the normal function of the computer in some way.
I'm sure all my friends will be happy to know that Mark, Jason, and Princess (or Ace, Dirk, and Agatha, depending on when you were born) enjoy Boulevard Beer. Maybe I'll mix it up and see if Boxy Brown might recommend Mafia Wars or something.
...chime in please. It seems like the solution to this is potentially all user-side, and controllable? Adjust the buffers in your devices if you can, or perhaps find a way to reduce the TCP buffer in your modern operating system?
...speed dial with enough memory to store ten numbers...
Whoa whoa whoa....what now? What's all this fancy schmancy wizardry again? I'm expected to remember some arcane, complicated button combination simply to dial a phone number? It's always the same: you get something working just the way you want it, and some damn hot-shot wiz kid has to come along and make screw it all up.
It's XBox all over again. They'll lose several billion on WP7 and write it off. WP8 will come out and after three years of shoving the platform down people's throats, they'll be a hard won 25% of the market. Don't get me wrong, I own an XBox 360 but how many years of mistakes did it take for them and how much did they lose on the original to come to that piece of market share?
This is exactly spot on. There will be enough integration and management benefits that businesses will (eventually) begin to migrate to it for corporate needs, more and more consumers will be talked into it by Verizon reps, and eventually they'll gain a foothold. Microsoft really doesn't have any other choice but to stick with it, and to take a beating with it early if necessary. Plan B is to just be a complete non-factor - or worse, non-participant - in the mobile world.
- You need to have some very frank discussions with either your Dell rep, or whomever is speccing out your quotes. $1k for corporate-level desktop PC in this day and age is ridiculous; you should be expecting to pay more like $600-700. To give you an idea, I work for a state university, and we're currently giving about $550 for a Core2 E8400/4Gig Ram/160gig HD HP. Integrated video and no monitor of course, but a 3 year warranty. Sure you're not going to be decoding the human genome with that machine but it's more than enough for your average office worker. Don't be afraid to use HP as a club against your Dell rep; they're currently getting hammered by HP in the corporate world, and won't want to lose your account, assuming you're of any kind of size. I wouldn't recommend going to HP unless you absolutely have to though; service is horrible.
- Take some time to consider whether the time spent building custom machines is really worth the time of whomever would be doing it. Chances are, it is not. Either you're going to have someone making peanuts doing the work, or a skilled IT person who really isn't all that interested in doing what essentially is grunt work. In either case, you're going to see problems.
- If you haven't already, you should discuss this with your purchasing department before moving forward. Depending on the level of beauracracy that is entrenched in your level of government, building your own computers may not even be permissable.
You mentioned that you couldn't find anyone doing this on a large scale, this should be a warning flag. Lot of potential problems and pitfalls here, not the least of which is your cunning "transfer the OEM licenses" plan. There are a lot of better ways to save money on computer purchases.
Because it's Saturday, and we don't have anything else to get upset about! WE HAVE TO HAVE SOMETHING TO GET UPSET ABOUT, DON'T YOU UNDERSTAND?! How can I be expected to face the day if I'm not pissed off about something that doesn't directly affect me in any meaningful way?
"I've got a quarter we can flip to see if this is a good or bad thing."
You always have sniper towers on the corners. What a noob, leaking 5 inmates like that.
But if you revised this to say, "Never accessed again a week after it's creation", I'd believe it.
Now available in Regular, BBQ, and Cool Ranch flavors.
...to not get sued for pirating movies.
Don't pirate movies.
Also a sure fire 100% guaranteed way to get modded into oblivion I'm sure, but whatever. I just have to ask though: Who the fuck is pirating a Uwe Boll movie? You deserve to get sued morons.
There are so many weird and wonderful new things online. Just look at all the stuff that's being produced, from song parodies to music video parodies to fan films and the like. The impetus never went away, it's just not channeled through his show. As a case in point, MST3K. Had a great run, died a horrible death on the Skiffy Channel. Resurrected in the form of Cinematic Titanic and Rifftrax. They both seem to be making money doing what they're doing. I just get a kick out of hearing Tom Servo's voice riffing on new, crappy movies. I only wish Trace was working on that project, too. Mike I could do without -- I'm still hoping Joel comes back. (Give it up, man. Yeah, I know.)
It seems like a guy like Demento could have at one point (and perhaps still can) made a good living/impact by embracing this new media/outlet, having a website/show/podcast that specialized in highlighting new stuff in this vein, along with whatever original content they still wanted to do. As the other reply pointed out though, old school media guy, probably just never occurred to him.
Reading through his website announcements there is like a timeline of and old school radio guy dying. I'm not going to pretend I'm a big Demento fan, but still kind of sad. We're closing up, we're losing money. We got only 100 orders for a last ditch money making idea. We're clearly being hurt by the decline of CD sales. We can't fill orders because we're working with Yahoo Small Business for some reason.
Just out of curiosity, why the hell is going online/podcast a last-last ditch effort for this guy? He's got a name recognition that would draw people in, and the format would seem to work well for podcasting. At the very least a podcast could drive people to his website and help him sell a few CD's/tshirts. I get he's an old school guy and up until recently still had a terrestrial broadcast to do, but you'd think someone would have come to them at some point and suggested this.
Oh please. Because they thought it might have belonged to IBM or Microsoft?
But yeah, go buy yourself a good Powershell book. Assuming your environment is running XP at least, pushing out support for it is pretty much just an MSI install. Week or two playing around with it, and chances are you'll have a script that runs circles around your old one.
So, what, you proved that flesh can't block radio signals? Good job there moron, we've only known that for about 100 years or so.
God, I can't wait until the mainstream media gets wind of this one. The stupid, it will burn.
Several large advertising companies... including Google Inc.'s DoubleClick and Yahoo Inc.'s Right Media, said they were unaware of the data being sent to them from the social-networking sites, and said they haven't made use of it.
So major online advertising companies, who make their living analyzing data from server logs, who at a moments notice can tell you the click-through rate of any ad they currently have in rotation, who study the eye movements of users while using computers to design more effective ads, who have taken a medium where content is by and large free and found a way to make money off it, didn't notice they were being sent usernames and ID #'s that were tied to the click-throughs on some of their ads.
Yeah I have to agree with this, came here to say the same thing. Benchmarks have their uses, but chances are the real world difference between similarly-built machines is not going to be significant. Let's be honest here: Unless you're doing a roll-out to a bunch of coders or CIA Photoshop experts, chances are most of these PC's are going to be running a web browser, a groupware client, and a document/spreadsheet editor like 75% of the time.
Choosing a PC vendor based on price, reliability, and service is going to be far more useful and have a far greater RIO than picking the one that scored 5 points higher on 3DMark or whatever. There have to be much better uses of your time.