or virtual/private server company? And what would happen to the spammers? Account cancelled, so they'd just find another colo/host, or use one of many stolen credit cards to register another account with same host, under a different name. How is this any different?
While I'm a regular AVG user (Free Edition at home, and Network Edition for my clients), the interface is attrocious, the malware encyclopedia is next to useless, and the bizarre update/error-state notices are a nuisance. Version 8 improved the admin console a bit, but not nearly enough.
I too develop websites for people using Joomla, Drupal, etc. but have started investing more time in learning frameworks (Zend Framework/code igniter for PHP work, Django for Python) instead of hacking (err "extending") CMSs into a site somewhat resembling what my client asked for.
The problem with Joomla and friends is that while setting up canned community sites (forums, galleries, simple user ACL, etc.) with a modest template is fairly trivial, taking it beyond that is not as simple.
From a design/usability perspective, it's a free-for-all: every plugin developer has their own idea of what the markup should look like, what classes/ids to use, and how the administrative/user interface should operate; some of them use inline styles, some use nested tables -- I've even seen font tags. With a framework, there's a blank canvas for you to work with; you're not trying to step through source to find out what crappy plugin's css include is messing with your font sizing or breaking your layout.
Yes, you're free to modify CMS plugins, but you're at the mercy of the core engine or the plugin developer as to what you can modify. If you go beyond that, then you're going to have to either keep a branch of your changes and enjoy diffing each new update/version (big PITA), or try to get your changes folded into the core -- if your code is too custom and doesn't appeal to the masses, you're SOL.
Of course frameworks are not immune to "core conflicts" either, but the good ones will provide you with guidelines to follow, and stay out of your way should you decide to go somewhere else.
From a security perspective, it's as bad as it gets: check out milw0rm.com's list of exploits for Joomla -- the core engine may be solid, but the plugins and modules? Not so much. Now, you don't have to use 3rd-party add-ons, but what's the point of the CMS then? You might as well build it using a framework.
Joomla, Drupal, etc. are immensely popular for a reason: if you need to throw up a community site that is feature-complete and requires little to no coding or customizing, then by all means, go with something like Joomla; you get a boatload of functionality for minimal effort, but know what you're getting into for the long-haul.
Postini does this and all, for ~30 bucks a year per user. Plus, you're not using your cycles and bandwidth to do the dirty work: it's all done upstream before it even hits your network. Users can maintain their own white/blacklists, plus, they get a quarantine email sent daily that lists all the spam that was trapped over the last 24 hours, with an option to click "deliver" to send to their inbox immediately should a false positive be spotted. Another plus is outbound filtering: we route all our outbound mail through Postini (coupled with dropped LAN-side SMTP traffic), protecting us from getting blacklisted should a nasty spambot find it's way on our network.
But in my experience, that's not what happens. Instead, what happens is that the more talented and effective IT engineers are the ones most likely to leave -- to evaporate, if you will.
...are obviously biased:
Webster...works with organizations to help them with troubled or failed information technology (IT) projects.
If your company's IT department is in big trouble -- to the point where you're calling in management consultants to fix it -- everyone in IT is looking for another job, not just the talented ones. The reason they get hired elsewhere is because... they're talented? I call this the "NOthing to See Here in IT" (NOSHIT) Principle.
And these services are needed -- only 21% of the projects did not require attendant services.
First of all, what does IDC mean by "attendant services"? When I hear that, I think of the old half-blind guy that sits in the john at the rippers, handing out towels and cheap cologne for a tip. And trust me, kids: there's no way you're getting that second lapdance with wet hands and B.O.!
Jokes aside, are you going to call up your local best-of-breed Certified Middleware Synergizer (TM) to setup Subversion for your in-house Web developers? Not so much.
Rolling out Asterisk + SugarCRM on OpenVZ for the inside sales division? Probably.
A "Critical" or "High Importance" project isn't necessarily difficult and may not require any additional support beyond the (usually good) documentation and online support channels.
See this for what it is: IDC, yet again, working some vague numbers for a weak conclusion to sell an overpriced research paper.
Deserve? Yes, everyone deserves the right to keep their personal lives private. Should they expect privacy? Not likely. There's no free lunch in life, online or offline: why would Facebook spend many millions of dollars maintaining a social network without milking every last bit of profit out of their user base? They're going to do whatever they can get away with, period. I don't know why people find this so hard to grasp: it's like when I try to explain to people that those "free emoticons" they so fondly install are filling up somebody's offshore server with their personal information and filling their monitor with pop-up advertisements.
Vista does not allow you to specify what you want to backup, beyond a full disk image or a selection of based on canned categories like pictures, videos, music, and documents. You cannot add a filemask or a list of file extensions, let alone checking off a selection of specific files and/or folders like every fucking GUI backup software since the dawn of time.
Litchfield, who wrote the proof of concept code that was eventually used by Slammer, said that this many unsecured databases is enough to sustain another worm outbreak.
Come on. In a pinch, yeah, I'm glad I can surf on my Blackberry but there's no way a smart phone is going to supersede a computer for browsing the Web.
Unfortunately, there are people who matter in life that care about your appearance. Why not put on a suit and a pair of shoes and get that out of the way so you can focus on the harder things?
I could see a myriad of phishing attacks involving checking the user-agent string to see what distro/desktop manager the user is running, and presently a Web-based pop-up identical to the typical Gnome/KDE/whatever "sudo required" dialog to phish for passwords with sudoer (root) abilities.
Would love to get an early start on xmas shopping but alot of places won't ship to Canada -- amazon.com does, and I think bestbuy.com does too, but I can't think of anymore. Anyone have a list of sites or directory of sites that ship/sell to Canada?
90% of home users are going to buy what they know and that's PC. They don't want to learn anything new; they want minimal disruption and a "faster" computer. Sure, if they knew that they could find a reasonable alternative for their "must have" apps (Outlook and Word: "how would email work without them?") and a rebuild of their existing machine would make their computer run like new they probably wouldn't even buy a new machine. Unless something is truly broken, they only need to upgrade for gaming reasons. They're going to buy Vista because a) they probably don't have a choice anymore b) will be told that it's the "new" Windows and buying an old version would be silly.
10% are willing to try something new -- they're fine with learning a new way of doing things and they know that there's alternatives out there. They're very pleased that their computer doesn't clash with their decor anymore.
90% of your business users will use whatever IT tells them to use. IT is afraid of new things; they do not -- and cannot -- understand all the implications of a new operating system and painful experience tells them to leave well alone until some other fool^H^H^Hcolleague out there puts it on their networks and tells everyone about how horrible it is and how they had to spend all night trying to get it to do what it's supposed to do. And they'll ask the vendors -- the vendors have to adopt early for fear of being caught with their pants down when their clients ask them about it -- who will tell them to wait for the Service Pack to come out. IT will solemnly nod their heads and quietly pat themselves on the back for averting disaster.
10% of your business users have very nice suits and will use whatever they goddamn please. This will be whatever they goddamn wanted and it had better be goddamned working by lunch time on Monday morning.
I appreciate your insight -- you must be in the field -- but aside from the performance benefit of using the GPU, and perhaps the Cube/associative functionality, none of these features have ever crossed my mind, consciously. Yes, I can see the overall subconscious experience being positive, but there's nothing there that screams out at me as "gotta have it" or "I'm so glad they fixed that" and maybe that's the idea. Maybe, after rigorous field studies, they'll find the next generation of computer users much more productive than their ancestors because of subtleties such as these.
but can someone tell me what the "next gen" windows manager does for me, productivity-wise? I'm not trolling -- I'd really like to know why/what people are raving about with MacOSX/Vista/Beryl/Compiz and what they couldn't live without. I'm using Windows XP/2000 for 99% of my desktop use so obviously I'm missing something.
Why try to fight it? Unless your laptop has been "flagged" (did you bring it into the bathroom, George?) I'm sure you could go back a few weeks later and nobody would remember (or care).
Vista network performance is *supposed* to be better: "support for the Next Generation TCP/IP Stack" and "TCP/IP window size auto-tuning" are two features that the Que book, "Using Microsoft Windows Vista" describes. This audio issue is probably related to DRM, however.
There are some things that sound good, but I had to dig to find them -- "I/O cancellation" is one of them. I don't know how many times I've had a client crash their desktop when trying to access a non-synched shared folder when disconnected from their laptop; this is supposed to allow you to cancel requests to unresponsive network and hardware resources, but I've yet to try it out.
A CMS (Content Management System) or CRM or Wiki allows a large number of users to collaborate online, typically meeting business needs like product delivery, scheduling, Human Resource management, and internal business documentation.
Not quite.
You might get away with lumping a CMS with a wiki (depending on the features of the software), but a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system would typically manage your sales/customer lifecycle where a (Web) CMS would manage your Web site and the people who interact with it.
I mean, come on: Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt?
I read this:
"We are the only company in the industry that has the breadth of reach from consumer to enterprises to understand and deliver and to take full advantage of the services opportunity in all of these markets. I believe we're the only company with the platform DNA that's necessarily to viably deliver this highly leveragable platform approach to services. And we're certainly one of the few companies that has the financial capacity to capitalize on this sea change, this services transformation."
...and thanks to my handy-dandy bizspeak decoder ring, I can interpret this as: "We own the desktop at home and at work; our platform's everywhere; we have a metric assload of cash."
It's the epitome of bad bizspeak, and this might be BS if he actually addressed the services bit in detail but where's the FUD exactly? Come on, eWeek. Cashing in -- and getting paid -- on the anti-MS crowd is what this is all about. Of course Slashdot is there to lap it all up, eagerly.
You know... I always thought IT was a service to the people doing the actual work. Now I realize the people doing the actual work are only there so IT has a bunch of victims to terrorize. Thanks for opening my eyes.
Awesome. Instead of answering my question, you're paraphrasing the Daring Fireball rant.
Let me rephrase my question (since you're obviously not in IT): how does the iphone contribute to the company's bottom line?
And let's try one more: what does the iPhone offer that the *insert phone/email/platform of choice* doesn't already do? Takes neat pictures? No, unless you're a photographer, that probably doesn't help out the company. Umm, how about the sweet mp3 player? Unless you're an A & R rep for a record label, probably not.
Their "defacto standards" [sic] are crap if it means IT keeps their customers (the other employees) from doing their job. It's your job (and I'll just assume that you're working in IT) to make everyone else happy, not to push your "defacto standards".
Thank you for the spelling correction, but let me offer you a definition from wikipedia: "A de facto standard is a technical or other standard that is so dominant that everybody seems to follow it like an authorized standard". To me, using something that is well-supported, proven, with predictable cost centers enables you to do your job.
I'm not a Microsoft fanboy -- there's alot wrong with Exchange -- but it works for the most part, people know how to support it, and if my clients had to vote on having an iPhone and no Outlook synching vs. having a Blackberry with all-of-the-above, well, I think the choice is pretty obvious.
I'm also not naive -- I know the iphone will eventually find it's way into the corporate world -- but to throw away an existing working solution so some new phone -- no matter how neat it is -- is naive and ridiculous.
Self-important IT experts will continue to insist that the iPhone "must" or "needs to" support "business software systems", but in the meantime, their employees will be buying iPhones on their own. Make no mistake, when IT blowhards dismiss the iPhone because it doesn't integrate with "business software systems", what they mean is Exchange.
Who reads this angry fanboi drivel? It's a new phone (been there) with email and stuff (done that): it's hardly revolutionizing business (no SDKs) so why should IT bend over backwards, completely gut their defacto standards (yes, I'm talking about Exchange), just so the corporate users can play with their shiny new baubles at work?
Slashdot Mirror
or virtual/private server company? And what would happen to the spammers? Account cancelled, so they'd just find another colo/host, or use one of many stolen credit cards to register another account with same host, under a different name. How is this any different?
While I'm a regular AVG user (Free Edition at home, and Network Edition for my clients), the interface is attrocious, the malware encyclopedia is next to useless, and the bizarre update/error-state notices are a nuisance. Version 8 improved the admin console a bit, but not nearly enough.
I too develop websites for people using Joomla, Drupal, etc. but have started investing more time in learning frameworks (Zend Framework/code igniter for PHP work, Django for Python) instead of hacking (err "extending") CMSs into a site somewhat resembling what my client asked for.
The problem with Joomla and friends is that while setting up canned community sites (forums, galleries, simple user ACL, etc.) with a modest template is fairly trivial, taking it beyond that is not as simple.
From a design/usability perspective, it's a free-for-all: every plugin developer has their own idea of what the markup should look like, what classes/ids to use, and how the administrative/user interface should operate; some of them use inline styles, some use nested tables -- I've even seen font tags. With a framework, there's a blank canvas for you to work with; you're not trying to step through source to find out what crappy plugin's css include is messing with your font sizing or breaking your layout.
Yes, you're free to modify CMS plugins, but you're at the mercy of the core engine or the plugin developer as to what you can modify. If you go beyond that, then you're going to have to either keep a branch of your changes and enjoy diffing each new update/version (big PITA), or try to get your changes folded into the core -- if your code is too custom and doesn't appeal to the masses, you're SOL.
Of course frameworks are not immune to "core conflicts" either, but the good ones will provide you with guidelines to follow, and stay out of your way should you decide to go somewhere else.
From a security perspective, it's as bad as it gets: check out milw0rm.com's list of exploits for Joomla -- the core engine may be solid, but the plugins and modules? Not so much. Now, you don't have to use 3rd-party add-ons, but what's the point of the CMS then? You might as well build it using a framework.
Joomla, Drupal, etc. are immensely popular for a reason: if you need to throw up a community site that is feature-complete and requires little to no coding or customizing, then by all means, go with something like Joomla; you get a boatload of functionality for minimal effort, but know what you're getting into for the long-haul.
Postini does this and all, for ~30 bucks a year per user. Plus, you're not using your cycles and bandwidth to do the dirty work: it's all done upstream before it even hits your network. Users can maintain their own white/blacklists, plus, they get a quarantine email sent daily that lists all the spam that was trapped over the last 24 hours, with an option to click "deliver" to send to their inbox immediately should a false positive be spotted.
Another plus is outbound filtering: we route all our outbound mail through Postini (coupled with dropped LAN-side SMTP traffic), protecting us from getting blacklisted should a nasty spambot find it's way on our network.
If your company's IT department is in big trouble -- to the point where you're calling in management consultants to fix it -- everyone in IT is looking for another job, not just the talented ones. The reason they get hired elsewhere is because...
they're talented?
I call this the "NOthing to See Here in IT" (NOSHIT) Principle.
Let's just hope the farmers load the shells from the wooden boxes with the clouds on them, not the skull and crossbones, during the Olympics.
First of all, what does IDC mean by "attendant services"? When I hear that, I think of the old half-blind guy that sits in the john at the rippers, handing out towels and cheap cologne for a tip. And trust me, kids: there's no way you're getting that second lapdance with wet hands and B.O.!
Jokes aside, are you going to call up your local best-of-breed Certified Middleware Synergizer (TM) to setup Subversion for your in-house Web developers? Not so much.
Rolling out Asterisk + SugarCRM on OpenVZ for the inside sales division? Probably.
A "Critical" or "High Importance" project isn't necessarily difficult and may not require any additional support beyond the (usually good) documentation and online support channels.
See this for what it is: IDC, yet again, working some vague numbers for a weak conclusion to sell an overpriced research paper.
I'm running a server install of Ubuntu 7.04.
Deserve? Yes, everyone deserves the right to keep their personal lives private. Should they expect privacy? Not likely. There's no free lunch in life, online or offline: why would Facebook spend many millions of dollars maintaining a social network without milking every last bit of profit out of their user base? They're going to do whatever they can get away with, period. I don't know why people find this so hard to grasp: it's like when I try to explain to people that those "free emoticons" they so fondly install are filling up somebody's offshore server with their personal information and filling their monitor with pop-up advertisements.
Vista does not allow you to specify what you want to backup, beyond a full disk image or a selection of based on canned categories like pictures, videos, music, and documents. You cannot add a filemask or a list of file extensions, let alone checking off a selection of specific files and/or folders like every fucking GUI backup software since the dawn of time.
Come on. In a pinch, yeah, I'm glad I can surf on my Blackberry but there's no way a smart phone is going to supersede a computer for browsing the Web.
Unfortunately, there are people who matter in life that care about your appearance. Why not put on a suit and a pair of shoes and get that out of the way so you can focus on the harder things?
XP Pro is available retail until June 30, 2008 now.
Interestingly, it's 9:37pm EST and the page says it was updated on September 28th; must be done overseas?
I could see a myriad of phishing attacks involving checking the user-agent string to see what distro/desktop manager the user is running, and presently a Web-based pop-up identical to the typical Gnome/KDE/whatever "sudo required" dialog to phish for passwords with sudoer (root) abilities.
Would love to get an early start on xmas shopping but alot of places won't ship to Canada -- amazon.com does, and I think bestbuy.com does too, but I can't think of anymore. Anyone have a list of sites or directory of sites that ship/sell to Canada?
90% of home users are going to buy what they know and that's PC. They don't want to learn anything new; they want minimal disruption and a "faster" computer. Sure, if they knew that they could find a reasonable alternative for their "must have" apps (Outlook and Word: "how would email work without them?") and a rebuild of their existing machine would make their computer run like new they probably wouldn't even buy a new machine. Unless something is truly broken, they only need to upgrade for gaming reasons. They're going to buy Vista because a) they probably don't have a choice anymore b) will be told that it's the "new" Windows and buying an old version would be silly.
10% are willing to try something new -- they're fine with learning a new way of doing things and they know that there's alternatives out there. They're very pleased that their computer doesn't clash with their decor anymore.
90% of your business users will use whatever IT tells them to use. IT is afraid of new things; they do not -- and cannot -- understand all the implications of a new operating system and painful experience tells them to leave well alone until some other fool^H^H^Hcolleague out there puts it on their networks and tells everyone about how horrible it is and how they had to spend all night trying to get it to do what it's supposed to do. And they'll ask the vendors -- the vendors have to adopt early for fear of being caught with their pants down when their clients ask them about it -- who will tell them to wait for the Service Pack to come out. IT will solemnly nod their heads and quietly pat themselves on the back for averting disaster.
10% of your business users have very nice suits and will use whatever they goddamn please. This will be whatever they goddamn wanted and it had better be goddamned working by lunch time on Monday morning.
I appreciate your insight -- you must be in the field -- but aside from the performance benefit of using the GPU, and perhaps the Cube/associative functionality, none of these features have ever crossed my mind, consciously. Yes, I can see the overall subconscious experience being positive, but there's nothing there that screams out at me as "gotta have it" or "I'm so glad they fixed that" and maybe that's the idea. Maybe, after rigorous field studies, they'll find the next generation of computer users much more productive than their ancestors because of subtleties such as these.
but can someone tell me what the "next gen" windows manager does for me, productivity-wise? I'm not trolling -- I'd really like to know why/what people are raving about with MacOSX/Vista/Beryl/Compiz and what they couldn't live without. I'm using Windows XP/2000 for 99% of my desktop use so obviously I'm missing something.
Why try to fight it? Unless your laptop has been "flagged" (did you bring it into the bathroom, George?) I'm sure you could go back a few weeks later and nobody would remember (or care).
Vista network performance is *supposed* to be better: "support for the Next Generation TCP/IP Stack" and "TCP/IP window size auto-tuning" are two features that the Que book, "Using Microsoft Windows Vista" describes. This audio issue is probably related to DRM, however.
There are some things that sound good, but I had to dig to find them -- "I/O cancellation" is one of them. I don't know how many times I've had a client crash their desktop when trying to access a non-synched shared folder when disconnected from their laptop; this is supposed to allow you to cancel requests to unresponsive network and hardware resources, but I've yet to try it out.
Not quite.
You might get away with lumping a CMS with a wiki (depending on the features of the software), but a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system would typically manage your sales/customer lifecycle where a (Web) CMS would manage your Web site and the people who interact with it.
...and thanks to my handy-dandy bizspeak decoder ring, I can interpret this as: "We own the desktop at home and at work; our platform's everywhere; we have a metric assload of cash."
It's the epitome of bad bizspeak, and this might be BS if he actually addressed the services bit in detail but where's the FUD exactly? Come on, eWeek. Cashing in -- and getting paid -- on the anti-MS crowd is what this is all about. Of course Slashdot is there to lap it all up, eagerly.
Awesome. Instead of answering my question, you're paraphrasing the Daring Fireball rant.
Let me rephrase my question (since you're obviously not in IT): how does the iphone contribute to the company's bottom line?
And let's try one more: what does the iPhone offer that the *insert phone/email/platform of choice* doesn't already do? Takes neat pictures? No, unless you're a photographer, that probably doesn't help out the company. Umm, how about the sweet mp3 player? Unless you're an A & R rep for a record label, probably not.
Thank you for the spelling correction, but let me offer you a definition from wikipedia: "A de facto standard is a technical or other standard that is so dominant that everybody seems to follow it like an authorized standard". To me, using something that is well-supported, proven, with predictable cost centers enables you to do your job.
I'm not a Microsoft fanboy -- there's alot wrong with Exchange -- but it works for the most part, people know how to support it, and if my clients had to vote on having an iPhone and no Outlook synching vs. having a Blackberry with all-of-the-above, well, I think the choice is pretty obvious.
I'm also not naive -- I know the iphone will eventually find it's way into the corporate world -- but to throw away an existing working solution so some new phone -- no matter how neat it is -- is naive and ridiculous.