Although Windows firewall isn't perfect... it can protect against an employee bypassing the corporate network and connecting directly to the internet (either via a USB wireless card), a wiring error that opens a direct connection or VPN to a client's network that isn't protected. Of course, a local firewall is a necessity on a laptop. More annoying than windows firewall are home users who think that if one firewall program is good, two, or three would be even better. Nothing more annoying than firewalls that are busy swearing at each oterh.
I can't install the recent versions of FF or Safari on a version of the Mac OS (OS 10.3) that is much more recent than XP. It seems that MS does a better (if not perfect) job of supporting its older OSs than others. At some point, the support costs become too high to back port everything, and from a business decision not having IE9 available for XP may encourage others to upgrade to W7. (And selling W7 is where MS will make money.) BTW... W7 is a really good OS.
Quickbooks (the accounting software) has been around for quite a while; also workbook and workbooks (in the accounting and Excel) sense has been around. Also, I believe the term "facebook" has been around forever in the sense of a freshman book of photos. which is of course where facebook (tm) (r) (patented) (etc) got the term.
We need to remember that Walt works for the Wall Street Journal, which is owned by Fox News. It's strongly to Fox's advantage to have consumers with cheap, high-speed broadband as it lowers Fox's distribution cost. It's like Walt arguing that printing and paper prices should be controlled so everyone can get the newspaper at a cheaper rate. As much as I'd like cheaper internet rates, the argument that he makes might be just be employer speak.
The difference with PEs and MDs is that they have legal liability for their work. When a PE signs off on a document, he or she and their firm have professional liability for the correctness of the design. The same is true (in a slightly different sense) for MDs. I've never been a big believer in software certs, although they are a way of measuring someone's focus in completing the project. Also useful at big companies as a way of training and measuring progress. Not a substitute for a good degree and relevant real-world experince in a well-managed team. (The worst offenders are cowboy (or cowgirl) coders who have no team experience or who have just worked in a one- or tw-person team with another cowboy.
Detail oriented - taking data, using Excel, and making meaningful tables/graphs/averages.
Preferred Experience:
* Experience with simulation tools such as XFDTD, HFSS is a plus
It looks like the person will not be in front of a Mac while doing their work. Excel is likely on the PC (no iWorks here), while HFSS (from ANSOFT) only runs on Windows, Red Hat, SuSE and Solaris (SPARCS only). I guess there aren't professional-quality 3D Full-wave Electromagnetic Field Simulation in the Mac app store. (However, to be fair, XFDTD does run on the Mac. First EM simulation package in the industry to run natively on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux).
Using your argument, it would be ok if Dell or HP sold a combo hardware/software box that could only run manufacturer approved application. Selling a packaged combo, with a limited number of software options would minimize support cost and improve vendor margins. Software vendors would have to have their applications approved by Dell and could only sell their applications through Dell. And by the way, you'd need to use their approved browsers and accept whatever ads the manufacturer wanted to push at you. This model would improve PC reliability (only tested and approved applications could be run) and increase the manufacturer's revenue. Back in the old days, we called this crapware--but at least you could uninstall those applications or reinstall to OS (or the OS of your choice)..
The 70's called and they're offering timesharing again (although they are now calling it "cloud computing" as a new and improved name). Security was good, the core OS was secure and as a closed environment it wasn't prone to hackers. All you need is a TTY (preferably a ASR33), a dial up modem and you can call up your bank and get access to your account information.
The 60's have called have offered batch as an alternative.
Don't act like they did this because it was in the consumers' best interest. Their reasons were purely technical^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^hmarketing. If they weren't, they wouldn't feel compelled to add personal information to every single file you download from itunes.
Disallowing private machines on the network is good IT practice. Employeers should not allow any unapproved (and non-employer supplied) device to connect to their networks or machines (and this should include all USB devices like camera, MP3 players, headsets). If you need it for your job, your employer should supply and support it.
Most concerned and resonsible organizations use strong measures to authentic machines before they are allowed to connect to the corporate network. (They might allow guest machines is a firewalled zones for vistor/guest convenience.) I have to say that your employeers policy for no foreign machines on the network is quite reasonable. As for checking your mail remotely, there are some secure solutions for Exchange that enforce secure authentication and encryption for remote access via a web browser.
You might suggest that your employeer supply smart phones like the Blackberry that can be used for secure email access and can be remotely monitored and wiped if comprimised. (POTUS has a BB that passed the security screen.) I wouldn't be surprised if your employer restricts these devices to only business use (as it is their money that is paying for them.)
Firefox has a similar problem. The new versions are not support on fairly recent versions of the Mac OS. Windows XP is getting really old--how long does MS need to maintain compatibity? (It's not like they don't want customers to upgrade).
When Apple drops support for not very old versions of the OS or hardwar, it's called brilliant marketing strategy. When MS does it, it's called abandoning compatibility
SharePoint is underrated-- it really has gotten pretty goood. Although you say that the firm doesn't have a common infrastructure, it's likely that you've standardized on Microsoft Office. If you're using (or can upgrade to) Office 2007 (or 2010), sharepoint plays extremely well with Office. SharePoint will handle all your office documents. If you need a comprehensive solution for scanned paper or integration with other applications, I'd look at some of the commercial document management solutioms (Documentum).
Don't cheap out and try to put together some homebrew solution. Remember as Click and Clack the Tappit Brothers say, it's the cheap man/women who spends the most.
It seems to me that the single menu bar was a good idea when screens were relatively small. But now with 1600x1200 or larger (dual 30" screens anyone) be common, the distance from the "action" to the menu bar is far. The single menu bar made sense with up through OS 9 when the screen sizes were small. The work around is a zillion (tm) floating windows with controls (ala Adobe CS) which are really just a way to have submenus... And what with the Apple menu having the most prominent command be "about the Mac"? It's not like you need to check to see if someone has stolen your memory or upgraded your processor very frequently.
Tape is probably your best option. You can buy at DAT-5 (or even a DAT-4) tape drive for not very much. The tapes cost about $10 to $30 each (depending on what tape option you choose). Make 3 copies of the data set, store one onsite, store another offsite in a secure/climate controlled facility and send the 3rd to the client. Buy a spare tape drive and use both to make writing across tapes easier. There is a wide variety of software to write to the tape; we use the aging Retrospect.
The disk options is just way too complex; if anything, skip the RAID option and just store 2 copies. Putting the RAID sets back together and finding the RAID software will be nearly impossible in a couple of years. Use some standard formatting on the drives (FAT, NTFS, etc.) and you'll be good to go for the next 15 years.
And I was so hoping that they called it the Newton. Has a catchy ring to it, don't you think. Or they could have called it the Apple Newton Cube. Even better.
You should be thinking of more creative and easier ways to handle backup.
For example, if you don't have an Exchange Server you could switch the execs to IMAP. This way, at least their email is backed up on the server. (Also switch to Outlook 2007 to get their sent mail on the server).
Another way to handle backup is to give individual users a hard drive plugged into their docking station (you do have docking stations, don't you) and a couple of quick scripts to backup their Documents and Settings folders (no need to back up the OS.) There is also a great little add-in for Outlook pfbackup that will remind people to backup their outlook files. pfbackup makes it easy to backup an individuals outlook files (email, contacts, calendar).
You can also try enabling offline files for some directories. This way, when their machines are connected to the network the files will be automatically synchronized.
There are commercial backup programs that will launch automatically when connected (or at night) that will backup their files. Probably for a couple hunderd bucks you can solve the problem. I have to aggree with the exec that taking the machine on your schedule is quite unreasonable.
Execs are busy, have other things to consider. It's really your job to make it easy for them to backup.
What the study (or the reporting of it) failed to note is whether clowns, unicycling, or unicycling clowns are common on the campus. For example if everyone at the campus wears a clowns suit or unicycles then one more unicycling clown isn't noticible.
Agreed that most users don't have a clue, with/. readers being the exception. Almost all Windows users have.net installed, and I was pointing out that Fiddler is a pretty powerful tool for understanding what's being loaded by your browser and debugging ajax code. I'm sure linux/mac/amiga users have something equivalent--and perhaps one of them will point it out.
Fiddler (HTTP Debugging Proxy) is a pretty cool tool for checking on what a site is doing -- and much easier and more useful than looking at the TCP stack). Fiddler works with any browser and acts as a proxy between the browser and the web. It's also scriptable.
Highly recommend Fiddler for keeping tabs on who your browser is talking to. (Also, indespensible for debugging ajax.)
A more accurate way of testing this would be to use an x-y positioning device and test hitting specific areas of the screen and report back the x-y coordinates that were hit. Repeat over a few thousand points. Test for line drawing; view with optical scanner. Repeat test for equivalent of 3 years usage.
This would give you a valid measure of the accuracy of the screen decection and it's longevity. On wait a minute, the iPhone can't use a mechanical device but relies on the capacitance of the pointing device. Guess you'd need to build something fancier.
I believe that some of the early CDC machines (a company that is no longer around) had a 6-bit character. The Digital Equipment Company (DEC, alos a company that is no longer around) PDP-1, maybe the PDP-20, and some others also had a 6-bit character. The PDP's had 36-bit words, packing 6 characters into a word. And of course, the IBM machines (a company that is still around) used EBCDIC rather than ASCII (but did use an 8-bits per character). Some of the earlier (and even the 370's) IBM machines used BCD (binary coded decimal) for arithmetic (packing a number from 0 to 9 in 4 bits, with some sign and unassigned bits left over).
Also, back in the IBM JCL days, when allocating disk space for a file you could specify the number of cylinders (or tracks) that you wanted, the block size and the packing factor.
Don't know exactly what you're using your server for, but we host various clients with a top-tier hosting provider. One of the things I really like about this provider is that they will proactively help us with problems on our server. Part of what we pay them for is to alert us to problems and their indepth knowledge of the OS and sortware. They deal with the server OS and software (apache, mysql, etc.) everyday and have certified experts on staff. I consider it an advantage to host with a provider that can provide good advice and expert knowledge. I really doubt that they have a great (or any) interest in looking at our data or seeing who is browsing our sites.
Perhaps you are being a bit paranoid -- or over estimating the interest of your provider in whatever you do. Out of the couple of bucks you pay your hosting provider each month they don't have enough money to dig into your software.
If you really can't trust anyone to host your site, go with raw rack space and provide your own server.
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Although Windows firewall isn't perfect... it can protect against an employee bypassing the corporate network and connecting directly to the internet (either via a USB wireless card), a wiring error that opens a direct connection or VPN to a client's network that isn't protected. Of course, a local firewall is a necessity on a laptop. More annoying than windows firewall are home users who think that if one firewall program is good, two, or three would be even better. Nothing more annoying than firewalls that are busy swearing at each oterh.
I can't install the recent versions of FF or Safari on a version of the Mac OS (OS 10.3) that is much more recent than XP. It seems that MS does a better (if not perfect) job of supporting its older OSs than others. At some point, the support costs become too high to back port everything, and from a business decision not having IE9 available for XP may encourage others to upgrade to W7. (And selling W7 is where MS will make money.) BTW... W7 is a really good OS.
I don't why it matters if he had a PC or an Apple server? Or why the Media Access Control address of the device is important.
Quickbooks (the accounting software) has been around for quite a while; also workbook and workbooks (in the accounting and Excel) sense has been around. Also, I believe the term "facebook" has been around forever in the sense of a freshman book of photos. which is of course where facebook (tm) (r) (patented) (etc) got the term.
We need to remember that Walt works for the Wall Street Journal, which is owned by Fox News. It's strongly to Fox's advantage to have consumers with cheap, high-speed broadband as it lowers Fox's distribution cost. It's like Walt arguing that printing and paper prices should be controlled so everyone can get the newspaper at a cheaper rate. As much as I'd like cheaper internet rates, the argument that he makes might be just be employer speak.
The difference with PEs and MDs is that they have legal liability for their work. When a PE signs off on a document, he or she and their firm have professional liability for the correctness of the design. The same is true (in a slightly different sense) for MDs. I've never been a big believer in software certs, although they are a way of measuring someone's focus in completing the project. Also useful at big companies as a way of training and measuring progress. Not a substitute for a good degree and relevant real-world experince in a well-managed team. (The worst offenders are cowboy (or cowgirl) coders who have no team experience or who have just worked in a one- or tw-person team with another cowboy.
Look for good team experience.
Anyone check out the job requirements?
Detail oriented - taking data, using Excel, and making meaningful tables/graphs/averages.
Preferred Experience:
* Experience with simulation tools such as XFDTD, HFSS is a plus
It looks like the person will not be in front of a Mac while doing their work. Excel is likely on the PC (no iWorks here), while HFSS (from ANSOFT) only runs on Windows, Red Hat, SuSE and Solaris (SPARCS only). I guess there aren't professional-quality 3D Full-wave Electromagnetic Field Simulation in the Mac app store. (However, to be fair, XFDTD does run on the Mac. First EM simulation package in the industry to run natively on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux).
Using your argument, it would be ok if Dell or HP sold a combo hardware/software box that could only run manufacturer approved application. Selling a packaged combo, with a limited number of software options would minimize support cost and improve vendor margins. Software vendors would have to have their applications approved by Dell and could only sell their applications through Dell. And by the way, you'd need to use their approved browsers and accept whatever ads the manufacturer wanted to push at you. This model would improve PC reliability (only tested and approved applications could be run) and increase the manufacturer's revenue. Back in the old days, we called this crapware--but at least you could uninstall those applications or reinstall to OS (or the OS of your choice)..
Pretty much what Apple has done.
The 70's called and they're offering timesharing again (although they are now calling it "cloud computing" as a new and improved name). Security was good, the core OS was secure and as a closed environment it wasn't prone to hackers. All you need is a TTY (preferably a ASR33), a dial up modem and you can call up your bank and get access to your account information.
The 60's have called have offered batch as an alternative.
Don't act like they did this because it was in the consumers' best interest. Their reasons were purely technical^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^hmarketing. If they weren't, they wouldn't feel compelled to add personal information to every single file you download from itunes.
I have to agree with your employer on this one.
Disallowing private machines on the network is good IT practice. Employeers should not allow any unapproved (and non-employer supplied) device to connect to their networks or machines (and this should include all USB devices like camera, MP3 players, headsets). If you need it for your job, your employer should supply and support it.
Most concerned and resonsible organizations use strong measures to authentic machines before they are allowed to connect to the corporate network. (They might allow guest machines is a firewalled zones for vistor/guest convenience.) I have to say that your employeers policy for no foreign machines on the network is quite reasonable. As for checking your mail remotely, there are some secure solutions for Exchange that enforce secure authentication and encryption for remote access via a web browser.
You might suggest that your employeer supply smart phones like the Blackberry that can be used for secure email access and can be remotely monitored and wiped if comprimised. (POTUS has a BB that passed the security screen.) I wouldn't be surprised if your employer restricts these devices to only business use (as it is their money that is paying for them.)
If the walls are Windows (r), then you probably should use Visual Studio.
There's a problem with the design of the RCA connectors... The signal path is connected before the ground.
Firefox has a similar problem. The new versions are not support on fairly recent versions of the Mac OS. Windows XP is getting really old--how long does MS need to maintain compatibity? (It's not like they don't want customers to upgrade).
When Apple drops support for not very old versions of the OS or hardwar, it's called brilliant marketing strategy. When MS does it, it's called abandoning compatibility
SharePoint is underrated-- it really has gotten pretty goood. Although you say that the firm doesn't have a common infrastructure, it's likely that you've standardized on Microsoft Office. If you're using (or can upgrade to) Office 2007 (or 2010), sharepoint plays extremely well with Office. SharePoint will handle all your office documents. If you need a comprehensive solution for scanned paper or integration with other applications, I'd look at some of the commercial document management solutioms (Documentum).
Don't cheap out and try to put together some homebrew solution. Remember as Click and Clack the Tappit Brothers say, it's the cheap man/women who spends the most.
It seems to me that the single menu bar was a good idea when screens were relatively small. But now with 1600x1200 or larger (dual 30" screens anyone) be common, the distance from the "action" to the menu bar is far. The single menu bar made sense with up through OS 9 when the screen sizes were small. The work around is a zillion (tm) floating windows with controls (ala Adobe CS) which are really just a way to have submenus... And what with the Apple menu having the most prominent command be "about the Mac"? It's not like you need to check to see if someone has stolen your memory or upgraded your processor very frequently.
Tape is probably your best option. You can buy at DAT-5 (or even a DAT-4) tape drive for not very much. The tapes cost about $10 to $30 each (depending on what tape option you choose). Make 3 copies of the data set, store one onsite, store another offsite in a secure/climate controlled facility and send the 3rd to the client. Buy a spare tape drive and use both to make writing across tapes easier. There is a wide variety of software to write to the tape; we use the aging Retrospect.
The disk options is just way too complex; if anything, skip the RAID option and just store 2 copies. Putting the RAID sets back together and finding the RAID software will be nearly impossible in a couple of years. Use some standard formatting on the drives (FAT, NTFS, etc.) and you'll be good to go for the next 15 years.
And I was so hoping that they called it the Newton. Has a catchy ring to it, don't you think. Or they could have called it the Apple Newton Cube. Even better.
You should be thinking of more creative and easier ways to handle backup.
For example, if you don't have an Exchange Server you could switch the execs to IMAP. This way, at least their email is backed up on the server. (Also switch to Outlook 2007 to get their sent mail on the server).
Another way to handle backup is to give individual users a hard drive plugged into their docking station (you do have docking stations, don't you) and a couple of quick scripts to backup their Documents and Settings folders (no need to back up the OS.) There is also a great little add-in for Outlook pfbackup that will remind people to backup their outlook files. pfbackup makes it easy to backup an individuals outlook files (email, contacts, calendar).
You can also try enabling offline files for some directories. This way, when their machines are connected to the network the files will be automatically synchronized.
There are commercial backup programs that will launch automatically when connected (or at night) that will backup their files. Probably for a couple hunderd bucks you can solve the problem. I have to aggree with the exec that taking the machine on your schedule is quite unreasonable.
Execs are busy, have other things to consider. It's really your job to make it easy for them to backup.
Stop whining. Do your job.
What the study (or the reporting of it) failed to note is whether clowns, unicycling, or unicycling clowns are common on the campus. For example if everyone at the campus wears a clowns suit or unicycles then one more unicycling clown isn't noticible.
Bad reporting. No donuts.
Agreed that most users don't have a clue, with /. readers being the exception. Almost all Windows users have .net installed, and I was pointing out that Fiddler is a pretty powerful tool for understanding what's being loaded by your browser and debugging ajax code. I'm sure linux/mac/amiga users have something equivalent--and perhaps one of them will point it out.
Fiddler (HTTP Debugging Proxy) is a pretty cool tool for checking on what a site is doing -- and much easier and more useful than looking at the TCP stack). Fiddler works with any browser and acts as a proxy between the browser and the web. It's also scriptable.
Highly recommend Fiddler for keeping tabs on who your browser is talking to. (Also, indespensible for debugging ajax.)
A more accurate way of testing this would be to use an x-y positioning device and test hitting specific areas of the screen and report back the x-y coordinates that were hit. Repeat over a few thousand points. Test for line drawing; view with optical scanner. Repeat test for equivalent of 3 years usage.
This would give you a valid measure of the accuracy of the screen decection and it's longevity. On wait a minute, the iPhone can't use a mechanical device but relies on the capacitance of the pointing device. Guess you'd need to build something fancier.
What ever happened to solid scientific testing?
I believe that some of the early CDC machines (a company that is no longer around) had a 6-bit character. The Digital Equipment Company (DEC, alos a company that is no longer around) PDP-1, maybe the PDP-20, and some others also had a 6-bit character. The PDP's had 36-bit words, packing 6 characters into a word. And of course, the IBM machines (a company that is still around) used EBCDIC rather than ASCII (but did use an 8-bits per character). Some of the earlier (and even the 370's) IBM machines used BCD (binary coded decimal) for arithmetic (packing a number from 0 to 9 in 4 bits, with some sign and unassigned bits left over).
Also, back in the IBM JCL days, when allocating disk space for a file you could specify the number of cylinders (or tracks) that you wanted, the block size and the packing factor.
Don't know exactly what you're using your server for, but we host various clients with a top-tier hosting provider. One of the things I really like about this provider is that they will proactively help us with problems on our server. Part of what we pay them for is to alert us to problems and their indepth knowledge of the OS and sortware. They deal with the server OS and software (apache, mysql, etc.) everyday and have certified experts on staff. I consider it an advantage to host with a provider that can provide good advice and expert knowledge. I really doubt that they have a great (or any) interest in looking at our data or seeing who is browsing our sites.
Perhaps you are being a bit paranoid -- or over estimating the interest of your provider in whatever you do. Out of the couple of bucks you pay your hosting provider each month they don't have enough money to dig into your software.
If you really can't trust anyone to host your site, go with raw rack space and provide your own server.
It's not that hard of a problem to solve.