Spoken from the self-entitled end-user's perspective!
You do realize that the end-users are why we have jobs, right? As IT, our job is to make their jobs easier and more productive. You forget that at your peril. Once you start acting like Mordrac The Preventer, other people in the company will start looking for ways to get rid of you.
And you're telling me I should let someone walk around with uncontrolled access to a multi-million dollar client list, documents, etc, in their pocket?
If they have access to that list on their device, it doesn't matter if you control the device or not. Nothing stops them from emailing the list to an outside address they control, or copying it into a notepad file and saving it to a thumb-drive, or, if all else fails, just writing the damn list down on a piece of paper. Maybe if you're in a super-secure military installation where all this stuff is locked down, that might stop them (or maybe not – see the recent article about the Chinese hacking into U.S. military aircraft plans). But in a normal business environment, the remedies against someone walking off with your confidential data are legal, not technical.
Well since that is such a big issue for you, Since I control the network, I guess you WONT be bringing your own device and using it at work.
Chew on that......
Congratulations – you've now set up your IT department to be a universally hated roadblock. Don't look too surprised when they decide to outsource you to "the cloud".
The problem is that unless you can make a strong legal and/or business case for it, having the top management in a mid-size or large company held to the same standards as everyone else just isn't going to happen. For that matter, you probably can't force the company's best salesman to follow IT rules either – they outrank the IT department.
You might be able to rein in upper management if you can convince them and their peers that bad IT security practices are a violation of PCI standards (which can result in them pulling your company's ability to take credit cards) or Sarbanes-Oxley compliance (which can actually get the suits thrown in jail if they're unlucky enough). But just saying it isn't best practices isn't enough. Nor is saying that it's a violation of company policy – these are the people who make company policy. You will need clear and specific documentation saying that a particular practice could get them in actual trouble with some outside body.
Sounds like an act of war. Why are we not fighting the Chinese yet?
All countries spy on each other, all the time. If this were considered a valid reason to start a shooting war, the entire planet would be a glowing, smoking crater.
China doesn't share or sell any genuinely sensitive information to North Korea. They tolerate the Kim Dynasty since they don't like instability (they think the fall of North Korea might lead to something worse, which they can't control) and they don't want a U.S. ally on their border. But they don't actually like or trust the North Korean leadership and aren't stupid enough to give them A-list weapons.
If the government were smart, they'd use Linux instead of Windows, and in addition, they'd make their own custom version of Linux.
They already did that: SE Linux. Obviously, in this case, it didn't help. Very few security procedures work if they aren't followed. Besides, even if everyone in the government was doing this, how can we be sure what the contractors were doing?
Thing is... a lot of this is about performance. If they create, say, a fighter with the performance of the F-35, then it's a real problem.
Why? The last time I checked, we still have ~5,000 nuclear weapons, which is more than enough to deter any rational nation-state from attacking us. It's only "a real problem" if we think that empire is an imperative – that the U.S. must endlessly intervene in conflicts around the globe for no reason, conflicts which are apparently important enough to kill soldiers and civilians but not important enough to fight a nuclear war over. Maybe we should stop doing that. We didn't do it for most of American history and the rest of the world carried on as normal.
So, while everyone is evangelizing the death of the game console, I think they are set for a huge boom because more people are gamified now than ever before, and eventually some of them are going to want to do more then flick raster birds at pigs. Sony and Microsoft (and sigh, even NIntendo) are going to be sitting there waiting for the sames to come over the next 5 - 8 years when people get bored of the same derivative games available on their phones and tablets.
You're calling tablet and phone gaming derivative? Talk about the pot calling the kettle black. The "hardcore" gaming market hasn't had a new idea in 10-20 years. It's all Doom clones and WoW clones as far as the eye can see.
It seems to me that consoles are under attack from two different directions. The casual gamers have mostly defected to smartphones and tablets, and when they do need something hooked up to a TV, the Nintendo Wii seems to be their first choice. (Take a look at Wikipedia's list of best-selling video games – the Wii absolutely demolishes the competition in that console generation.) These games don't have much processing power, but that doesn't matter. All that matters to casual gamers is if the games are fun to play.
The hardcore gamers tend to prefer a PC running Steam, since this gives much more flexibility and power – they can choose their own configuration, game with multiple monitors if they want, and get better graphics than any console can provide. They do trade off cost and energy usage, but generally don't care about those things.
With the hardcore market dominated by Steam and the casual market dominated by Apple/Android/Nintendo, there isn't much room for Sony and Microsoft consoles.
While you adjust for inflation, don't forget to adjust for manufacturing costs, too. A custom PCB with 16 MBit of mask ROMs was not particularly cheap in 1993.
People don't want gaming rigs hooked up to their main screen, not unless they're a dweeb living on their own. Come back when a decent machine will sit next to the receiver and not look out of place, and is near silent when playing a modern game.
There are plenty of computer cases designed specifically to fit in with audiovisual equipment. The Silverstone Grandia GD07 and GD08 got decent ratings from Silent PC Review, and they can fit full-size graphics cards (up to 398 mm long, according to the review). As for the graphics card, Asus DirectCU models tend to work very well, maintaining good thermals without too much noise.
You can have a reasonably silent, powerful gaming PC that doesn't look out of place next to your TV right now, if you are willing to put some effort (and money) into the build rather than just throwing together the cheapest crap you can find on Newegg.
As far as gamers are concerned, Nintendo *DID* get knocked out of the console market. While they had considerable success with the Wii, it wasn't at their competitors expense. Nintendo had to create a new far more casual market in order to continue doing business.
Just because you aren't a hardcore FPS or MMORPG junkie doesn't mean you aren't a "gamer". That stuff is actually a small part of the gaming market these days.
Oh wow, that really makes sense because Mozilla makes good products and Foxconn makes ultra low quality crap like for example MP3 players that fail within a month and the world's worst motherboards.
Foxconn builds to whatever price point the customer wants. If you order cheap crap, they'll build cheap crap. If you pay extra for a high-quality product (as Apple does), then that's what you'll get.
The workers get treated like crap either way, though.
So an American corporation takes a long view on a business proposition rather than playing the short con quarterly filing scams, and this is a bad thing?
It's bad when they are a convicted monopolist dumping products below cost in order to extend their monopoly to another sector.
Everyone already considers mistakes done as a toddler irrelevant, and most do so for mistakes done as a preteen as well.
This will just push the age limit for acceptability of "sins of youth" further.
As well it should. Reputable scientific studies demonstrate that full adult maturity doesn't arrive until the mid-20s. Specifically, "the frontal cortex areaâ"which governs judgment, decision-making and impulse controlâ"doesnâ(TM)t fully mature until around age 25."
The statistics back this up. If you look at who is committing violent crime and other serious antisocial behavior, it's almost always young males aged 14 to 25.
You've already failed at project of that size if you're letting a developer be "alone for a week to come up with something good". A developer's job, in a project like that, isn't to come up with something good. Their job is to implement a specific piece of functionality in the specific way defined by the people whose job is to have the broader view of the project.
You're going to have a hard time hiring and retaining decent developers with that kind of approach.
I could have told you in advance, just from that list, that the project was going to fail.
Fail, that is, from the perspective of the agency and its taxpayers. From the perspective of the consulting companies, it worked just fine. They wanted big fees and got them.
Yeah unions are great. That steel industry sure is kicking ass and the cost/quality of American cars can't be beat!
The Germans and Japanese don't seem to have any trouble building competitive cars with union labor. So either American unions are considerably worse than their counterparts in other countries, or the problem lies somewhere else. The Big Three haven't exactly had brilliant management. In fact, their management has traditionally been crappy and shortsighted.
German workers get paid much more than American workers and even have representation on corporate boards. Yet manufacturing in Germany is thriving and the quality of their goods is among the best in the world.
How about making a straight forward good old console. Why do we need to have all consoles internet active and DRM locked, what ever happened to the rocking systems like the NES ans SNSES?
If you ever saw that stupid blinking red light when trying to boot a game, you encountered a DRM-related problem on your NES.
Whenever the NES boots, its internal CIC (authentication) chip tries to do a handshake with the matching CIC chip in the cartridge. If it fails, then it goes into an endless reboot cycle (that blinking red light. This process is very sensitive to dirt or other contaminants on the connectors. Making matters worse, instead of using a standard card edge connector, they used a weird ZIF-like connector which was very unreliable. This was for marketing reasons, because they didn't want it to look like a game console (these had a bad reputation after the 1983 video game crash).
This DRM was aimed at unlicensed publishers, but it often affected end users as collateral damage. Nintendo wanted a cut of third-party game sales, and was also concerned that a flood of crappy third-party titles had helped precipitate the 1983 crash.
The game data itself was, fortunately, not encrypted in any way – they figured that the cartridge form factor would be enough to deter casual copying, and for the most part they were right.
The original Japanese Famicom didn't have any of this crap, and neither did the top-loading NES that was released in the early 1990s.
Imagine this pitch to an investor: "As a software company, our coders are our biggest asset. That's why we don't let them take a proper lunch, and feed them junk food and caffeine instead. This is directly reflected in the quality of their code."
At Google, they do feed them a proper lunch. But most companies can't be bothered; if there is a company cafeteria at all, it's outsourced to Aramark or some such scum, and run as a profit center rather than an employee benefit.
Can't speek to OS X but Android is so brain damaged as to not look much like Unix/Linux at all.
Actually, Android's security model is much better than the traditional Unix security model. The traditional Unix model is that the program is the user and has the same permission as if the user were manually doing the operation him/herself. This was designed in the 1970s when all users were coders, and makes no sense today when people download untrusted code from the Internet on a regular basis. Android's security model has fine-grained permissions, so an app has to specify in a manifest exactly what it wants to do, and these restrictions are enforced by the OS.
It's true that other aspects of Android also do "not look much like Unix/Linux at all" but this is to its great credit. The traditional Unix/Linux design (a dozen different layers of crap on top of X11 on top of a console) is brain damaged and utterly unsuitable for end-user computing in the 21st century.
Don't even get me started on using a PC/laptop to output to a TV. I've tried to explain a simple "PC video > HDTV, PC audio > sound system" setup to people and been flatly told to shut up and just make it work.
It's no more difficult to hook up a modern PC to a HDTV than it is to hook up any other device. Your description above implies they are using a separate sound system (not the TV's speakers) so it would go something like this:
1. Connect a HDMI cable from the PC's HDMI output to an HDMI input on your A/V receiver
2. Connect a HDMI cable from the A/V receiver's video output to a HDMI input on your TV
3. Set the TV so it displays input from the HDMI input you used
4. Set the A/V receiver so it plays sound from the HDMI input you used
5. Turn on the PC and set the resolution to match the TV's resolution.
And if they don't care about surround sound, then all you have to do is wire the PC straight to the TV via HDMI. How much simpler than this can it get? If someone can't figure that out, then they won't be able to figure out how to connect any modern audiovisual device, including a game console.
If someone is too stupid to figure out how to set up their PC to play Netflix, they can always buy a Roku box. It'll be significantly cheaper than the Xbox One and better suited to that particular purpose.
Slashdot Mirror
Spoken from the self-entitled end-user's perspective!
You do realize that the end-users are why we have jobs, right? As IT, our job is to make their jobs easier and more productive. You forget that at your peril. Once you start acting like Mordrac The Preventer, other people in the company will start looking for ways to get rid of you.
And you're telling me I should let someone walk around with uncontrolled access to a multi-million dollar client list, documents, etc, in their pocket?
If they have access to that list on their device, it doesn't matter if you control the device or not. Nothing stops them from emailing the list to an outside address they control, or copying it into a notepad file and saving it to a thumb-drive, or, if all else fails, just writing the damn list down on a piece of paper. Maybe if you're in a super-secure military installation where all this stuff is locked down, that might stop them (or maybe not – see the recent article about the Chinese hacking into U.S. military aircraft plans). But in a normal business environment, the remedies against someone walking off with your confidential data are legal, not technical.
Well since that is such a big issue for you, Since I control the network, I guess you WONT be bringing your own device and using it at work. Chew on that ......
You're fired.
Signed, Your CEO
If the terms of your employment are that you BYOD and comply with company security policies then you do that or you don't have a job.
Those terms of employment may violate labor law. Forcing employees to buy their own workplace equipment is generally not permitted.
Congratulations – you've now set up your IT department to be a universally hated roadblock. Don't look too surprised when they decide to outsource you to "the cloud".
The problem is that unless you can make a strong legal and/or business case for it, having the top management in a mid-size or large company held to the same standards as everyone else just isn't going to happen. For that matter, you probably can't force the company's best salesman to follow IT rules either – they outrank the IT department.
You might be able to rein in upper management if you can convince them and their peers that bad IT security practices are a violation of PCI standards (which can result in them pulling your company's ability to take credit cards) or Sarbanes-Oxley compliance (which can actually get the suits thrown in jail if they're unlucky enough). But just saying it isn't best practices isn't enough. Nor is saying that it's a violation of company policy – these are the people who make company policy. You will need clear and specific documentation saying that a particular practice could get them in actual trouble with some outside body.
Sounds like an act of war. Why are we not fighting the Chinese yet?
All countries spy on each other, all the time. If this were considered a valid reason to start a shooting war, the entire planet would be a glowing, smoking crater.
North Korea buys from China. Are you scared now?
China doesn't share or sell any genuinely sensitive information to North Korea. They tolerate the Kim Dynasty since they don't like instability (they think the fall of North Korea might lead to something worse, which they can't control) and they don't want a U.S. ally on their border. But they don't actually like or trust the North Korean leadership and aren't stupid enough to give them A-list weapons.
If the government were smart, they'd use Linux instead of Windows, and in addition, they'd make their own custom version of Linux.
They already did that: SE Linux. Obviously, in this case, it didn't help. Very few security procedures work if they aren't followed. Besides, even if everyone in the government was doing this, how can we be sure what the contractors were doing?
Thing is... a lot of this is about performance. If they create, say, a fighter with the performance of the F-35, then it's a real problem.
Why? The last time I checked, we still have ~5,000 nuclear weapons, which is more than enough to deter any rational nation-state from attacking us. It's only "a real problem" if we think that empire is an imperative – that the U.S. must endlessly intervene in conflicts around the globe for no reason, conflicts which are apparently important enough to kill soldiers and civilians but not important enough to fight a nuclear war over. Maybe we should stop doing that. We didn't do it for most of American history and the rest of the world carried on as normal.
So, while everyone is evangelizing the death of the game console, I think they are set for a huge boom because more people are gamified now than ever before, and eventually some of them are going to want to do more then flick raster birds at pigs. Sony and Microsoft (and sigh, even NIntendo) are going to be sitting there waiting for the sames to come over the next 5 - 8 years when people get bored of the same derivative games available on their phones and tablets.
You're calling tablet and phone gaming derivative? Talk about the pot calling the kettle black. The "hardcore" gaming market hasn't had a new idea in 10-20 years. It's all Doom clones and WoW clones as far as the eye can see.
It seems to me that consoles are under attack from two different directions. The casual gamers have mostly defected to smartphones and tablets, and when they do need something hooked up to a TV, the Nintendo Wii seems to be their first choice. (Take a look at Wikipedia's list of best-selling video games – the Wii absolutely demolishes the competition in that console generation.) These games don't have much processing power, but that doesn't matter. All that matters to casual gamers is if the games are fun to play.
The hardcore gamers tend to prefer a PC running Steam, since this gives much more flexibility and power – they can choose their own configuration, game with multiple monitors if they want, and get better graphics than any console can provide. They do trade off cost and energy usage, but generally don't care about those things.
With the hardcore market dominated by Steam and the casual market dominated by Apple/Android/Nintendo, there isn't much room for Sony and Microsoft consoles.
While you adjust for inflation, don't forget to adjust for manufacturing costs, too. A custom PCB with 16 MBit of mask ROMs was not particularly cheap in 1993.
People don't want gaming rigs hooked up to their main screen, not unless they're a dweeb living on their own. Come back when a decent machine will sit next to the receiver and not look out of place, and is near silent when playing a modern game.
There are plenty of computer cases designed specifically to fit in with audiovisual equipment. The Silverstone Grandia GD07 and GD08 got decent ratings from Silent PC Review, and they can fit full-size graphics cards (up to 398 mm long, according to the review). As for the graphics card, Asus DirectCU models tend to work very well, maintaining good thermals without too much noise.
You can have a reasonably silent, powerful gaming PC that doesn't look out of place next to your TV right now, if you are willing to put some effort (and money) into the build rather than just throwing together the cheapest crap you can find on Newegg.
Because my 70" TV is far more fun to game on than your tiny little laptop.
Your graphics card almost certainly has a HDMI output. Your 70" TV almost certainly has a HDMI input. You do the math.
As far as gamers are concerned, Nintendo *DID* get knocked out of the console market. While they had considerable success with the Wii, it wasn't at their competitors expense. Nintendo had to create a new far more casual market in order to continue doing business.
Just because you aren't a hardcore FPS or MMORPG junkie doesn't mean you aren't a "gamer". That stuff is actually a small part of the gaming market these days.
Oh wow, that really makes sense because Mozilla makes good products and Foxconn makes ultra low quality crap like for example MP3 players that fail within a month and the world's worst motherboards.
Foxconn builds to whatever price point the customer wants. If you order cheap crap, they'll build cheap crap. If you pay extra for a high-quality product (as Apple does), then that's what you'll get.
The workers get treated like crap either way, though.
So an American corporation takes a long view on a business proposition rather than playing the short con quarterly filing scams, and this is a bad thing?
It's bad when they are a convicted monopolist dumping products below cost in order to extend their monopoly to another sector.
Everyone already considers mistakes done as a toddler irrelevant, and most do so for mistakes done as a preteen as well. This will just push the age limit for acceptability of "sins of youth" further.
As well it should. Reputable scientific studies demonstrate that full adult maturity doesn't arrive until the mid-20s. Specifically, "the frontal cortex areaâ"which governs judgment, decision-making and impulse controlâ"doesnâ(TM)t fully mature until around age 25."
The statistics back this up. If you look at who is committing violent crime and other serious antisocial behavior, it's almost always young males aged 14 to 25.
You've already failed at project of that size if you're letting a developer be "alone for a week to come up with something good". A developer's job, in a project like that, isn't to come up with something good. Their job is to implement a specific piece of functionality in the specific way defined by the people whose job is to have the broader view of the project.
You're going to have a hard time hiring and retaining decent developers with that kind of approach.
I could have told you in advance, just from that list, that the project was going to fail.
Fail, that is, from the perspective of the agency and its taxpayers. From the perspective of the consulting companies, it worked just fine. They wanted big fees and got them.
Yeah unions are great. That steel industry sure is kicking ass and the cost/quality of American cars can't be beat!
The Germans and Japanese don't seem to have any trouble building competitive cars with union labor. So either American unions are considerably worse than their counterparts in other countries, or the problem lies somewhere else. The Big Three haven't exactly had brilliant management. In fact, their management has traditionally been crappy and shortsighted.
German workers get paid much more than American workers and even have representation on corporate boards. Yet manufacturing in Germany is thriving and the quality of their goods is among the best in the world.
How about making a straight forward good old console. Why do we need to have all consoles internet active and DRM locked, what ever happened to the rocking systems like the NES ans SNSES?
If you ever saw that stupid blinking red light when trying to boot a game, you encountered a DRM-related problem on your NES.
Whenever the NES boots, its internal CIC (authentication) chip tries to do a handshake with the matching CIC chip in the cartridge. If it fails, then it goes into an endless reboot cycle (that blinking red light. This process is very sensitive to dirt or other contaminants on the connectors. Making matters worse, instead of using a standard card edge connector, they used a weird ZIF-like connector which was very unreliable. This was for marketing reasons, because they didn't want it to look like a game console (these had a bad reputation after the 1983 video game crash).
This DRM was aimed at unlicensed publishers, but it often affected end users as collateral damage. Nintendo wanted a cut of third-party game sales, and was also concerned that a flood of crappy third-party titles had helped precipitate the 1983 crash.
The game data itself was, fortunately, not encrypted in any way – they figured that the cartridge form factor would be enough to deter casual copying, and for the most part they were right.
The original Japanese Famicom didn't have any of this crap, and neither did the top-loading NES that was released in the early 1990s.
Imagine this pitch to an investor: "As a software company, our coders are our biggest asset. That's why we don't let them take a proper lunch, and feed them junk food and caffeine instead. This is directly reflected in the quality of their code."
At Google, they do feed them a proper lunch. But most companies can't be bothered; if there is a company cafeteria at all, it's outsourced to Aramark or some such scum, and run as a profit center rather than an employee benefit.
Can't speek to OS X but Android is so brain damaged as to not look much like Unix/Linux at all.
Actually, Android's security model is much better than the traditional Unix security model. The traditional Unix model is that the program is the user and has the same permission as if the user were manually doing the operation him/herself. This was designed in the 1970s when all users were coders, and makes no sense today when people download untrusted code from the Internet on a regular basis. Android's security model has fine-grained permissions, so an app has to specify in a manifest exactly what it wants to do, and these restrictions are enforced by the OS.
It's true that other aspects of Android also do "not look much like Unix/Linux at all" but this is to its great credit. The traditional Unix/Linux design (a dozen different layers of crap on top of X11 on top of a console) is brain damaged and utterly unsuitable for end-user computing in the 21st century.
Don't even get me started on using a PC/laptop to output to a TV. I've tried to explain a simple "PC video > HDTV, PC audio > sound system" setup to people and been flatly told to shut up and just make it work.
It's no more difficult to hook up a modern PC to a HDTV than it is to hook up any other device. Your description above implies they are using a separate sound system (not the TV's speakers) so it would go something like this:
And if they don't care about surround sound, then all you have to do is wire the PC straight to the TV via HDMI. How much simpler than this can it get? If someone can't figure that out, then they won't be able to figure out how to connect any modern audiovisual device, including a game console.
If someone is too stupid to figure out how to set up their PC to play Netflix, they can always buy a Roku box. It'll be significantly cheaper than the Xbox One and better suited to that particular purpose.