Funny how North Americans are fine with selling their soul to get a discount on their mobile phones by locking into a contract and having their phones SIM-locked...yet all this noise about the iPad and it's "closed" ecosystem.
What a horrid example! Would you replace a Ferrari's brakes with some Ford parts? Is Ferrari exploiting these fools (amazing how much fools can afford nowadays) because they can't take it into "Joe's Autogarage"? I mean car parts are car parts aren't they? There is no reason why Ferrari can't standardize on all parts that are more commonly on the market.
There is no swiss army knife people! If anything, techies should learn that there are different markets out there. Some people like "freedom" to tinker, others just want an appliance. I deal with IT all day at work. I want my stuff outside of work to just...well, work. I don't want to help people install, debug, and fix their Linux and Windows messes. If anything, I tell my non-techie friends to buy Apple stuff and to just use it and not mess with it. Works for them and works for me.
Just look at Windows drivers versus Mac drivers. I know with any Mac driver issues I go to Apple and tell them to fix them. I don't get a load of crap apps from vendors who think they know what I need, I can depend on Apple to sort out their driver issues. Windows?? Good luck. Freedom is for those who know what they are doing. Trust me, plenty of people don't know what they are doing.
Perhaps MS should finally grow some balls and ditch legacy code. Just do it. It's not about what the customer thinks they want, it's about progress. Do it like Jobs.
Just one question, we've got non-Microsoft Anti-Virus/Anti-Malware, non-Microsoft client firewall, non-Microsoft anti-spyware...why are we spending money on all this for our organization if it doesn't mitigate against these zero-day vulnerabilities?
I guess they all remain quiet as nobody wants to share this spotlight with MS.
Honestly, does anyone NOT choose Google? If there is a better search engine out there please let me know. Try looking for Microsoft material on Bing. You'd think if anything Microsoft's own search engine would be a good way to find Microsoft material. No dice! Typically Google's first result will be a link directly to a MS site with the content I look for whereas Bing will have a whole bunch of crap with their own sites somewhere further down the list.
In a thriving economy with enormous growth, there are plenty of people who have time to contribute because they have the luxury of a well paying job and the best of intentions. Place these restrictions on the contributors, plus the failing economy and you have the perfect storm for a grand exodus. To answer the question, "Where are people going?" They are spending time looking for a job, working more hours, or working more than one job to make ends meet. They are donating their time to activities that reward them for their contributions rather then getting stuck in the bureaucracy.
Then again, if you look at the number of iPhone apps that are published each day. Maybe people are building apps instead. Same painful approval process; but, at least you might get paid.
I've preached this for a long time. Remove the seatbelts, airbags and install an iron spike that pops out of the steering column on impact. Sure there will be some collateral damage at first; however, at the end of the day people will sure drive safely and all the a-hole drivers out there will either learn to be courteous and pay attention or get quickly weeded out of the gene pool.
The Citrix/Terminal Server type solution is fine for employees who are chained to their desks; however, this does not bode well for mobile workers. Sales people, accountants, business people, etc. who are on the road need to be able to work while offsite and sometimes disconnected. There are places in the world, where the availability of low cost high bandwidth wireless exists rendering this a non-issue; however, North America is not one of those places.
What is the solution for those who are on the road, in a plane, or on a train? For large enterprise, probably Windows 7 if they are still on XP.
There are ways to make everything extra security and efficient and I think this is the best:
When you check-in, you check-in yourself along with your luggage. You go into a room, strip down to your undies, pack everything away and lay down in some sort of secure capsule. The capsule monitors your health and provides you with something that knocks you out and keeps you knocked out until the end of the flight. People are placed along with their luggage onto a conveyor belt and people are stacked up in the most efficient manner. This would eliminate the need for security screening as we know it, and is only slightly more invasive/intrusive as it is today.
In Hong Kong, many long-haul flights board and disembark First Class and Business Class separately. Sorry for all you guys in cattle class. And of course when you arrive elsewhere you don't get this treatment. But of course there are ways to address the issue of dual boarding, when have you seen the gangway being a fixed piece at gate that the airplane must pull up to in exact fashion? The plane parks and the gangway moves to the plane.
I've noticed that in the past two years I've been getting messages that go straight to my voicemail that are advertisements for crap I don't want. I also started getting the odd SMS spam here and there. Worse are when a telemarketer or fax machine dials my cellphone in Canada. For the consumer, this is a complete rip off. I never had these problems with my phone in the Netherlands because someone would have to pay for that and not me.
If someone really wants to talk to me, they should pay for it. That would keep random noise down.
In the enterprise environment I work in, our standard is to strip out all crapplications that come with hardware drivers because they result in user confusion, unnecessary clutter in the system tray, and/or bloating of what's loaded in memory. I wish Microsoft would use their big stick to require hardware vendors to provide drivers that contain ONLY drivers with no crapplications.
Sure the public school system may be able to hide behind their unions and "privacy" concerns, but perhaps that would further segragate the quality of education received by those in private school. As a parent paying big money to send a kid to a private school, one would feel this would be a right. If one pays for it, one deserves the right to see what they've paid for. Just like Kramer, there is a line between discipline and acting in a way that is uncalled for.
I don't know if anyone has brought this up yet; however, a colleague of mine raised a seriously good point. If anyone is an expert at fraud prevention with electronic selection, it has to be the casino's or the people who build electronic gambling devices such as slot machines. I mean, isn't there some sort of permanent record on all slot machines where the casino can verify that no cheating has occurred? Haven't casino's figured out the majority of ways people can defraud them of money? Maybe people should let casino's run elections. I mean, you'd probably get a better voter turnout at the casinos when there's a possibility of a free buffet as a frequent voter!
$7.50/hour? Take that into context of quotes that one can hire 5-10 for the price of 1 from UK. So these guys are making $0.75/hour? That's what makes exploitation of data more likely when outsourcing offshore. But unless the consumer is aware and cares, such losses are a minor hit when taken with the savings in taking things offshore. So enpower yourself by doing business with those who care about your data.
The issues with the patches from this month affect desktops that are not on XP SP2. Windows XP SP2 has been out for long enough for even large organizations to put it through adequate QA. Not having SP2 on your desktop is a gaping hole and issues with these patches highlight the risk faced by lagards. I think that those who complain about lack of response by MS to address issues with a security patch that affect only XP SP1 are misplaced. They should be asking themselve why it's taken them so long to deploy a service pack that's been for almost two years!
Calm down. It is easy to succumb to media hype and not look deeper. But if you do, you'll find that administrators have options available to them and so do users.
What happend to Larry's campaign that his products were unbreakable? No need to patch if your products are unbreakable. Notice how that campaign slowly just fizzed out?
I think there is some confusion here. To the best of my knowledge the success of Microsoft and their ability to provide a relatively low cost and consistent client for application development and deployment for applications has had much more of an impact that anything that Sun has developed. Without a client, what good is the network? Take a look at the "network thin client" as an example. Where is it today?
Despite so many online and network applications, many business users need to function offline.
Java is also quite a moot point nowadays. The write once run anywhere model maybe a factor on the server side; however, on the client side for enterprise customers simply not an issue. What enterprise customers run multiple client platforms successfully? Few and at what cost?
If anyone should be rewarded for providing millions of jobs for the world, it should be Bill Gates. Mock his OS all you want, nobody is perfect. But just take a look around and count the number of jobs directly affected by Microsoft products and compare that to those directly affected by Sun's.
-If software and hardware all worked perfectly, I'd be without a job.
The criticism that MS Office is feature rich yet people barely use those features hence those features are not required in an Open Source product is extremely flawed. If you ask Microsoft, a statistic of 50-80% of feature requests they receive from their users are for features already included in the product. The difficulty of increasingly feature rich products, is a user friendly interface that is intuitive but flexible and powerful. Microsoft has spent a lot of money into UI development in Office 12. Their approach is to ensure the users are quickly able to access the features that are relevant to what they are doing, instead of having to click through a ton of menus.
Many IT professionals forget that despite the penetration of technology throughout people's lives, that the average user uses IT resources for business purposes. They don't care about what the technology is behind the screens and mouse clicks. They care about systems that helps them do their job efficiently and effectively.
Regardless of the religious battle between Microsoft and Open Source solutions, the fact remains that the winner will be what delivers on your users needs. In large enterprise, it is rare that a decision is made in the vacuum of IT logic only. There are politics, costs, supportability, and liability issues to consider regardless of whether you go with an OSS or non-OSS solution.
All this craziness about banning IM and VOIP services within the confines of the corporate walls is even scarier than big brother. It is big brother without any brains behind it. There are several assumptions that are just scary in the notion that employees cannot be trusted. Honestly, this is the real paranoia behind it all isn't it? That you can't trust your employees?
I mean, why don't we ban the use of telephones, cell phones, fax machines, minute taking during meetings, and any contact with your colleagues and customers? I mean, are those devices fully compliant to the pseudo-security mumbo jumbo that these people pretend to affect IM and VOIP? I mean, that's what people do right? Block me from IM, and I SMS my friend, relatives, associates and customers from my mobile. Block me from Skype and I'll just pick up the phone or my mobile.
Could somebody please stop the insanity, and just write up a worldwide memo that people are just not to be trusted? And that any conversations or interactions with other people cannot be permitted without a lawyer and a permanent record. Oh wait a sec, and that record must be reviewed and signed off by all parties with all the relavent disclaimers attached to ensure that nobody's views are deemed accurate?
Isn't this a good example of the irony of the capitalist mentality of industrialized nations. Policy driven by the need to make money until it offends enough with those with the power to make change.
I mean, let me see are you telling me censorship does not exist in the US? And what is the policy on homosexuality and gay marriage by the president in the United States? Wow, certain people are oppressed in the US too you know?
Funny we speak of good and bad like we actually know how to define such as well. So it is being "good" to be against the policies of a foreign government. Yet it is bad to limit the "freedom" to bear arms in the United States. And gun manufacturers are never factored into the equation when things like Columbine happen.
From a support perspective, I'd say that if a PC vendor bundles a machine with this OS and non-MS bundles the potential here is that the hardware vendor will only provide "support" on the products installed. So let's say they bundle with Quicktime and iTunes if the user installs MS Media Player and the user get's difficult the support desk could tell the user to uninstall MS Media Player. I think all this media player stuff is nonsense with the EU has no positive impact for anybody, and simply a waste of people's tax dollars.
Just as Netscape was once the better browser, and now Firefox is gaining again...the only reason why other players do not gain market share is they are crap filled with too many ads and features people don't care about. Make a player that is quick, simple to use, and let's you play any media format and why would anyone use anything else? Problem is that there is no such player right now.
In Amsterdam I find that often roads and traffic lights are designed to maximize driver frustration. There are too many cars in the city and it is a way to reduce the convenience of driving to get people out of their cars. So this could be used in reverse to maximize frustration for drivers.
Slashdot Mirror
Funny how North Americans are fine with selling their soul to get a discount on their mobile phones by locking into a contract and having their phones SIM-locked...yet all this noise about the iPad and it's "closed" ecosystem.
What a horrid example! Would you replace a Ferrari's brakes with some Ford parts? Is Ferrari exploiting these fools (amazing how much fools can afford nowadays) because they can't take it into "Joe's Autogarage"? I mean car parts are car parts aren't they? There is no reason why Ferrari can't standardize on all parts that are more commonly on the market.
There is no swiss army knife people! If anything, techies should learn that there are different markets out there. Some people like "freedom" to tinker, others just want an appliance. I deal with IT all day at work. I want my stuff outside of work to just...well, work. I don't want to help people install, debug, and fix their Linux and Windows messes. If anything, I tell my non-techie friends to buy Apple stuff and to just use it and not mess with it. Works for them and works for me.
Just look at Windows drivers versus Mac drivers. I know with any Mac driver issues I go to Apple and tell them to fix them. I don't get a load of crap apps from vendors who think they know what I need, I can depend on Apple to sort out their driver issues. Windows?? Good luck. Freedom is for those who know what they are doing. Trust me, plenty of people don't know what they are doing.
Perhaps MS should finally grow some balls and ditch legacy code. Just do it. It's not about what the customer thinks they want, it's about progress. Do it like Jobs.
Just one question, we've got non-Microsoft Anti-Virus/Anti-Malware, non-Microsoft client firewall, non-Microsoft anti-spyware...why are we spending money on all this for our organization if it doesn't mitigate against these zero-day vulnerabilities?
I guess they all remain quiet as nobody wants to share this spotlight with MS.
Honestly, does anyone NOT choose Google? If there is a better search engine out there please let me know. Try looking for Microsoft material on Bing. You'd think if anything Microsoft's own search engine would be a good way to find Microsoft material. No dice! Typically Google's first result will be a link directly to a MS site with the content I look for whereas Bing will have a whole bunch of crap with their own sites somewhere further down the list.
In a thriving economy with enormous growth, there are plenty of people who have time to contribute because they have the luxury of a well paying job and the best of intentions. Place these restrictions on the contributors, plus the failing economy and you have the perfect storm for a grand exodus. To answer the question, "Where are people going?" They are spending time looking for a job, working more hours, or working more than one job to make ends meet. They are donating their time to activities that reward them for their contributions rather then getting stuck in the bureaucracy.
Then again, if you look at the number of iPhone apps that are published each day. Maybe people are building apps instead. Same painful approval process; but, at least you might get paid.
I've preached this for a long time. Remove the seatbelts, airbags and install an iron spike that pops out of the steering column on impact. Sure there will be some collateral damage at first; however, at the end of the day people will sure drive safely and all the a-hole drivers out there will either learn to be courteous and pay attention or get quickly weeded out of the gene pool.
People are way to "babied" nowadays.
The Citrix/Terminal Server type solution is fine for employees who are chained to their desks; however, this does not bode well for mobile workers. Sales people, accountants, business people, etc. who are on the road need to be able to work while offsite and sometimes disconnected. There are places in the world, where the availability of low cost high bandwidth wireless exists rendering this a non-issue; however, North America is not one of those places.
What is the solution for those who are on the road, in a plane, or on a train? For large enterprise, probably Windows 7 if they are still on XP.
There are ways to make everything extra security and efficient and I think this is the best:
When you check-in, you check-in yourself along with your luggage. You go into a room, strip down to your undies, pack everything away and lay down in some sort of secure capsule. The capsule monitors your health and provides you with something that knocks you out and keeps you knocked out until the end of the flight. People are placed along with their luggage onto a conveyor belt and people are stacked up in the most efficient manner. This would eliminate the need for security screening as we know it, and is only slightly more invasive/intrusive as it is today.
Yay!
In Hong Kong, many long-haul flights board and disembark First Class and Business Class separately. Sorry for all you guys in cattle class. And of course when you arrive elsewhere you don't get this treatment. But of course there are ways to address the issue of dual boarding, when have you seen the gangway being a fixed piece at gate that the airplane must pull up to in exact fashion? The plane parks and the gangway moves to the plane.
I've noticed that in the past two years I've been getting messages that go straight to my voicemail that are advertisements for crap I don't want. I also started getting the odd SMS spam here and there. Worse are when a telemarketer or fax machine dials my cellphone in Canada. For the consumer, this is a complete rip off. I never had these problems with my phone in the Netherlands because someone would have to pay for that and not me.
If someone really wants to talk to me, they should pay for it. That would keep random noise down.
In the enterprise environment I work in, our standard is to strip out all crapplications that come with hardware drivers because they result in user confusion, unnecessary clutter in the system tray, and/or bloating of what's loaded in memory. I wish Microsoft would use their big stick to require hardware vendors to provide drivers that contain ONLY drivers with no crapplications.
Sure the public school system may be able to hide behind their unions and "privacy" concerns, but perhaps that would further segragate the quality of education received by those in private school. As a parent paying big money to send a kid to a private school, one would feel this would be a right. If one pays for it, one deserves the right to see what they've paid for. Just like Kramer, there is a line between discipline and acting in a way that is uncalled for.
I don't know if anyone has brought this up yet; however, a colleague of mine raised a seriously good point. If anyone is an expert at fraud prevention with electronic selection, it has to be the casino's or the people who build electronic gambling devices such as slot machines. I mean, isn't there some sort of permanent record on all slot machines where the casino can verify that no cheating has occurred? Haven't casino's figured out the majority of ways people can defraud them of money? Maybe people should let casino's run elections. I mean, you'd probably get a better voter turnout at the casinos when there's a possibility of a free buffet as a frequent voter!
$7.50/hour? Take that into context of quotes that one can hire 5-10 for the price of 1 from UK. So these guys are making $0.75/hour? That's what makes exploitation of data more likely when outsourcing offshore. But unless the consumer is aware and cares, such losses are a minor hit when taken with the savings in taking things offshore. So enpower yourself by doing business with those who care about your data.
The issues with the patches from this month affect desktops that are not on XP SP2. Windows XP SP2 has been out for long enough for even large organizations to put it through adequate QA. Not having SP2 on your desktop is a gaping hole and issues with these patches highlight the risk faced by lagards. I think that those who complain about lack of response by MS to address issues with a security patch that affect only XP SP1 are misplaced. They should be asking themselve why it's taken them so long to deploy a service pack that's been for almost two years!
Hello All,
a milyId=4516A6F7-5D44-482B-9DBD-869B4A90159C&displa ylang=en
Calm down. It is easy to succumb to media hype and not look deeper. But if you do, you'll find that administrators have options available to them and so do users.
1) IE7 Blocker Toolkit - non-expiring toolkit will assist admistrators through Group Policy or script to set registry to prevent automatic update to IE7:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?F
2) Admins who have Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) deployed already has control over what is pushed to the corporate desktop
3) Users individually have the ability to decline the install
I have also heard that users can uninstall IE7 from add/remove programs, this will revert the user back to IE6.
What happend to Larry's campaign that his products were unbreakable? No need to patch if your products are unbreakable. Notice how that campaign slowly just fizzed out?
I think there is some confusion here. To the best of my knowledge the success of Microsoft and their ability to provide a relatively low cost and consistent client for application development and deployment for applications has had much more of an impact that anything that Sun has developed. Without a client, what good is the network? Take a look at the "network thin client" as an example. Where is it today?
Despite so many online and network applications, many business users need to function offline.
Java is also quite a moot point nowadays. The write once run anywhere model maybe a factor on the server side; however, on the client side for enterprise customers simply not an issue. What enterprise customers run multiple client platforms successfully? Few and at what cost?
If anyone should be rewarded for providing millions of jobs for the world, it should be Bill Gates. Mock his OS all you want, nobody is perfect. But just take a look around and count the number of jobs directly affected by Microsoft products and compare that to those directly affected by Sun's.
-If software and hardware all worked perfectly, I'd be without a job.
The criticism that MS Office is feature rich yet people barely use those features hence those features are not required in an Open Source product is extremely flawed. If you ask Microsoft, a statistic of 50-80% of feature requests they receive from their users are for features already included in the product. The difficulty of increasingly feature rich products, is a user friendly interface that is intuitive but flexible and powerful. Microsoft has spent a lot of money into UI development in Office 12. Their approach is to ensure the users are quickly able to access the features that are relevant to what they are doing, instead of having to click through a ton of menus.
Many IT professionals forget that despite the penetration of technology throughout people's lives, that the average user uses IT resources for business purposes. They don't care about what the technology is behind the screens and mouse clicks. They care about systems that helps them do their job efficiently and effectively.
Regardless of the religious battle between Microsoft and Open Source solutions, the fact remains that the winner will be what delivers on your users needs. In large enterprise, it is rare that a decision is made in the vacuum of IT logic only. There are politics, costs, supportability, and liability issues to consider regardless of whether you go with an OSS or non-OSS solution.
All this craziness about banning IM and VOIP services within the confines of the corporate walls is even scarier than big brother. It is big brother without any brains behind it. There are several assumptions that are just scary in the notion that employees cannot be trusted. Honestly, this is the real paranoia behind it all isn't it? That you can't trust your employees?
I mean, why don't we ban the use of telephones, cell phones, fax machines, minute taking during meetings, and any contact with your colleagues and customers? I mean, are those devices fully compliant to the pseudo-security mumbo jumbo that these people pretend to affect IM and VOIP? I mean, that's what people do right? Block me from IM, and I SMS my friend, relatives, associates and customers from my mobile. Block me from Skype and I'll just pick up the phone or my mobile.
Could somebody please stop the insanity, and just write up a worldwide memo that people are just not to be trusted? And that any conversations or interactions with other people cannot be permitted without a lawyer and a permanent record. Oh wait a sec, and that record must be reviewed and signed off by all parties with all the relavent disclaimers attached to ensure that nobody's views are deemed accurate?
Isn't this a good example of the irony of the capitalist mentality of industrialized nations. Policy driven by the need to make money until it offends enough with those with the power to make change.
I mean, let me see are you telling me censorship does not exist in the US? And what is the policy on homosexuality and gay marriage by the president in the United States? Wow, certain people are oppressed in the US too you know?
Funny we speak of good and bad like we actually know how to define such as well. So it is being "good" to be against the policies of a foreign government. Yet it is bad to limit the "freedom" to bear arms in the United States. And gun manufacturers are never factored into the equation when things like Columbine happen.
From a support perspective, I'd say that if a PC vendor bundles a machine with this OS and non-MS bundles the potential here is that the hardware vendor will only provide "support" on the products installed. So let's say they bundle with Quicktime and iTunes if the user installs MS Media Player and the user get's difficult the support desk could tell the user to uninstall MS Media Player. I think all this media player stuff is nonsense with the EU has no positive impact for anybody, and simply a waste of people's tax dollars.
Just as Netscape was once the better browser, and now Firefox is gaining again...the only reason why other players do not gain market share is they are crap filled with too many ads and features people don't care about. Make a player that is quick, simple to use, and let's you play any media format and why would anyone use anything else? Problem is that there is no such player right now.
In Amsterdam I find that often roads and traffic lights are designed to maximize driver frustration. There are too many cars in the city and it is a way to reduce the convenience of driving to get people out of their cars. So this could be used in reverse to maximize frustration for drivers.