Where I work, all laptops are required to have full disk encryption. These are windows laptops, and includes the swap file. And this includes developer machines. Building large source trees on a machine with this encryption just isn't realistically feasible, but its what were expected to do...
The security people tested it out first of course - on some support machines that do nothing more than email and word. And because it worked well enough there it was rolled out compony-wide...
I recently purchased a new laptop for myself. I spent a good few weeks talking to lots of retailers - including Dell - about getting it without Windows pre-installed. Linux installed was preferable but no OS was also an option that I would accept. None of the suppliers that I talked to would do this at all until I came across Efficient PC, who not only did exactly what I wanted but sold me Kubuntu 9.04 on my laptop the day after it was available for download.
My company uses subversion as the centralized source control system - was MS Source Safe when I started here, but we migrated over not long after - but I use git with git-svn locally on my machine because I find the branching and merging/rebasing in git much easier to work with.
Contract phones require ID because you are signing up to pay a monthly fee and they need to verify credit scores and the like.
My understanding is that this new requirement is for ID to be required for PayG phones - where there is no contract and no credit checks needed and you can pay cash for everything - so that people who might want to do that still have to tell the government who they are...
professions should do the same. It's so very easy to lie on your CV and claim you have skills that you don't actually have that it becomes easy to get jobs that you aren't qualified for when the recruiters don't verify you in some way.
The reason it's more important in IT than in some other fields is because of the rate things move. Having a degree and 10 years experience could just mean that your degree is 10 years old, and that your skills aren't up to date enough for what the company is after. Saying you know Java, doesn't actually mean you know the nuances of Java6 - you might have studied Java 1 at uni 10 years ago and have not touched it since.
At my current job, we've actually had people apply for programming jobs here that didn't know how to write a Swap routine in Java. Needless to say they didn't get the job. Why should other "professionals" get away with getting jobs when they don't have the up-to-date knowledge required to do it properly? You'd be really rather upset if you learnt that your accountant didn't know the relevant changes in tax law in the last 5 years, or if your doctor didn't know about the latest advances in surgery...
For everyone that didn't know, there is an online petition which is trying to stop exactly this. Everyone go and sign it to try and make sure that software patenting doesn't happen in Europe
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SaZZer
"Life is a lesson, you learn it when you're through", Limp Bizkit, M:I-2 Theme
There isn't a need to have word working on linux, simply because there are other programs that are written for linux AND can read the DOC format. I can think of one straight off(StarOffice) and know that there are others. It is still a shame that people insist on sending mails with word attachments. Personally I would have sent the reply in StarOffice format and see what they did with it.
The only possible way that a new format can ever work is if it is superior, in the public's opinion, to the current format. At the moment this means MP3, because it gives good quality sound and good compression for storage. Most people don't want much more out of a music format than good quality and good compression, and until something comes out that can rival MP3 in this then it just won't last.
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Where I work, all laptops are required to have full disk encryption. These are windows laptops, and includes the swap file. And this includes developer machines. Building large source trees on a machine with this encryption just isn't realistically feasible, but its what were expected to do...
The security people tested it out first of course - on some support machines that do nothing more than email and word. And because it worked well enough there it was rolled out compony-wide...
I wonder if any of the candidates will take note of this and pledge to stop patent trolls in order to bring more jobs back...
Its a small detail, but with the growing number of usb charging devices, having places to plug them in direct is a huge benefit.
I recently purchased a new laptop for myself. I spent a good few weeks talking to lots of retailers - including Dell - about getting it without Windows pre-installed. Linux installed was preferable but no OS was also an option that I would accept. None of the suppliers that I talked to would do this at all until I came across Efficient PC, who not only did exactly what I wanted but sold me Kubuntu 9.04 on my laptop the day after it was available for download.
My company uses subversion as the centralized source control system - was MS Source Safe when I started here, but we migrated over not long after - but I use git with git-svn locally on my machine because I find the branching and merging/rebasing in git much easier to work with.
Contract phones require ID because you are signing up to pay a monthly fee and they need to verify credit scores and the like.
My understanding is that this new requirement is for ID to be required for PayG phones - where there is no contract and no credit checks needed and you can pay cash for everything - so that people who might want to do that still have to tell the government who they are...
professions should do the same. It's so very easy to lie on your CV and claim you have skills that you don't actually have that it becomes easy to get jobs that you aren't qualified for when the recruiters don't verify you in some way.
The reason it's more important in IT than in some other fields is because of the rate things move. Having a degree and 10 years experience could just mean that your degree is 10 years old, and that your skills aren't up to date enough for what the company is after. Saying you know Java, doesn't actually mean you know the nuances of Java6 - you might have studied Java 1 at uni 10 years ago and have not touched it since.
At my current job, we've actually had people apply for programming jobs here that didn't know how to write a Swap routine in Java. Needless to say they didn't get the job. Why should other "professionals" get away with getting jobs when they don't have the up-to-date knowledge required to do it properly? You'd be really rather upset if you learnt that your accountant didn't know the relevant changes in tax law in the last 5 years, or if your doctor didn't know about the latest advances in surgery...
For everyone that didn't know, there is an online petition which is trying to stop exactly this. Everyone go and sign it to try and make sure that software patenting doesn't happen in Europe
--
SaZZer "Life is a lesson, you learn it when you're through", Limp Bizkit, M:I-2 Theme
There isn't a need to have word working on linux, simply because there are other programs that are written for linux AND can read the DOC format. I can think of one straight off(StarOffice) and know that there are others. It is still a shame that people insist on sending mails with word attachments. Personally I would have sent the reply in StarOffice format and see what they did with it.
The only possible way that a new format can ever work is if it is superior, in the public's opinion, to the current format. At the moment this means MP3, because it gives good quality sound and good compression for storage. Most people don't want much more out of a music format than good quality and good compression, and until something comes out that can rival MP3 in this then it just won't last.