The real issue with a WAP is that it is constantly inviting people to use it! It's broadcasting, offering to automatically set you up!
If someone just dropped off money, or a house, or a member of the preferred sex that fit your need, and that was eager to fill that need, what grounds for complaint could there be?
Blah blah blah. If I go down town for lunch with my laptop, and I open it up and see that there are a dozen available wireless connections, am I forbidden from using them. How about if I know that most of the downtown restaurants offer free wireless?
This is the case where I live, but it ain't all that savvy a town, so a lot of the points aren't well labeled. I can guess that the strongest wireless signal is from the restaurant I'm in, but it could be from one of the dozen loft apartments on the second floor of the building, or it could be from a restaurant across the street.
Am I supposed to not use the internet because I can't tell where the hell the signal is coming from, when I know that at least some of the signals are open on purpose?
This is the kind of crap that people like you want to stick the rest of us with. Open up your laptop, get signal, and then have to wander around trying to find out where the hell its coming from and if it's okay to use! Jesus, it'd be easier if they just provided ethernet cables.
The burden of security HAS to be on the provider of the service. Otherwise the whole system is worthless.
An open WAP isn't an open door; it is an open door, with a door man who gives you a key and a room number, and this door man is constantly shouting over a loudspeaker that there are rooms available to anyone who will listen.
In that case, if someone came in, would you blame them?
If I left my money, house, or girlfriend available on your property, I wouldn't really feel like I could complain if you helped yourself...That's what these people are doing. If I have a neighbor whose signal is strong enough to cause interference on my equipment, I feel no qualms about using his service.
If the WAP isn't even trivially secured, then that's an open invitation, same as having an FM radio signal crossing my property is an open invitation to monitor it. If you don't want other people to use it, don't leave it wide open.
I had a friend who did a CS project codenamed "The Unstoppable Sex Machine"; basically it spidered porn sites and downloaded the free images.
I always think about that in terms of that piece of entrapment...We all thought the USM was a lark, and we installed it a number of places for amusement value. It's just hard to imagine that, these days, that could have sent someone to jail.
Dems always suck on IP issues and censorship. That's been the case for decades. They think of the children waaaay too much.
On the other hand, republicans also suck for censorship (dems hate violence, repubs hate boobies), and they are far more likely to get "decency-style" laws passed, than infringe on individual liberty...If you can't buy booze on a Sunday in your state, somewhere, there is a Republican to thank.
I'm pretty sure it's in solar orbit, so of course it's possible. Probably be easier to do the sci-fi thing and strap a booster on it the next time around if that's what we want to do.
The big problem right now is that we can't predict what it's going to do with 100% accuracy...Screwing with it at this stage could queer things either way.
Obviously Apophis is not in Earth orbit, so the funnel analogy is not exact.
Still, small deflections in space are more measurable than deflections ground side. As narrow as the margin is, we don't want to screw with it if at all possible.
Well, it's not really like NASA would take some person's calculations, glance at them, and say, "Yup, he's right." If nothing else, it's terrible science, because you won't have put any real rigor into the check.
I'm agreeing on the BS call. If NASA agreed, NASA wouldn't just pass off some quote to a German newspaper. They'd have a press conference.
You ever go to the mall and drop a quarter in one of those funnel things? You know how it rolls around and around? Now, imagine putting something in front of the quarter...What will happen?
It'll slow down slightly, and the loss in speed will cause it to zip down the funnel.
That's what we're dealing with here. If this thing loses enough velocity, our gravity well will suck it in. If we could give it a push as it is on it's way past us, sure, we could get rid of it, but putting things in front of it is always going to be bad for us.
I think they're both to blame, frankly. On the one hand you have the CTO who is just pushing his crap product out the door on Friday and scoffing at the idea of training his support people.
And then you have the support guy who is passive aggressively telling his staff to badger the developer staff (in effect, throwing off his frustration with the CTO on them) and then failing to hash out the issue with his boss on Monday. It's his ass on the line! He needs to either stand up to his boss, he needs to go over his boss to his bosses boss and get him to assert some control over the CTO, or he needs to quit.
It's certainly doing his career prospects no good, and "It's not my fault" only goes so far for both of them.
That's what I was thinking, though it does sound like the support guys were just funneling the calls straight to the developers, which is pretty passive aggressive.
I think someone needs to sit them both down and knock heads. You can't have two halves of the team doing this sort of snippy crap; it impacts the customers, and that just can't be allowed.
Where I work, IT is full of empty space, most of all. We've lost about 70% of our staff since the 90's.
So no, we couldn't bring it all down to IT to support every new application: we don't have the manpower.
Now, when I got here, this shortage of manpower had resulted in draconian policies toward installed applications, because there weren't enough people to fix all the problems with the regular applications, more less user-installed stuff.
Now, instead of treating the users like children, we teach them to solve their own problems. We teach certain users to be able to solve other users problems. And we allow a very few users access to the sort of resources that normally belong solely to IT, and with those resources comes an expectation that they will use those freedoms wisely, and that they will be expected to maintain anything they install that is not part of our standard software package.
I still have tons of headaches, but comparatively few of those headaches are user related, and we have a lot fewer complaints.
You never know. I've had bad wifi experiences where there was no budget to do it the right way and serious concerns about doing it the wrong way, and they went ahead and did it and caused a shitstorm that went all the way to the network overlord for our half of the country and caused a bunch of draconian policy shifts which EVERYONE hates.
That was an issue with access to a protected network, but still...Sometimes you just can't get what you want.
I doubt it. IT generally moves at a faster pace than the users, in terms of OS, and common applications...At least we do here...Every time I hear about a shop that is "standardized" on IE 5.5 or some shit, I throw up a little.
But still, I'm forever dealing with people who are trying to "show" me things like Google Docs. Yea, wow, I know, it's been out forever. Now tell me how you're going to make it SOX compliant. There are reasons we use certain applications.
Generally we get more resistance when we're introducing new software than we do complaints about not using new-er software, and most of the time when we get complaints about not using newer software it's stuff we wish with all our hearts we WERE using (and sometimes its stuff we have installed on our machines so we can get used to using it by the time the budget money for the upgrade materializes).
What I'm talking about is more in terms of development environment crap. You upgrade activeperl on your system and all your hand-compiled.pm's go tits up...That's just not my problem. I may feel for ya, but we had an agreement.
I taught a guy a lot about how to not have that problem, after he had that problem, and I even loaned him a machine that he could use to host his apps while he un-borked his system...But I didn't fix it for him, and he didn't ask me to because we had a long discussion before I agreed to let him do his thing.
I'm not a mean guy, and I still do a certain amount of hand-holding (well, okay, I delegate the hand-holding to other people...but it gets done)...But for users who want real access to the systems? You have got to prove you deserve it.
If someone from IT came to me and asked me to help them fix their screwed up system, I'd laugh at 'em. Some people may not be great at it, but we all maintain our own junk, and I expect the same from the other users we allow to admin their own machines.
You're speculating. It's an engineering building; maybe someone upstairs is doing experiments and wants to minimize possible interference.
I'm just saying that without knowing why the request was denied you can't say that putting in WIFI was a good thing, or that the IT department was dropping the ball.
Oh for fucks sake. If they broke the OS. If they screwed up the system. I bet you're a real blast to work with.
You know how often I've had trouble with a power user this year? Never. Because I only give those permissions to competent people. Had one guy wipe out his system last year, and he worked 5 hours off the clock to set it right, because he knew it was his responsibility, and it meant more to him that he kept his privileges than the extra work did.
That is a productive employee, not one of the children you babysit.
Welllll, since the post I was responding to was from a guy talking about how people had set up WIFI covertly after IT had denied their request, I don't see how it's me whining rather than me pointing out issues that might have been a problem with an unauthorized install.
Speaking just for myself, I agree with you, there are a lot of ways to do it right.
How is that a contradiction? It's not unusual support to grab a handful of files off the local machine. It's just as likely that those files were lost due to hardware failure...Are you suggesting that we'd just ignore that?
There is a world of difference between that and supporting a non-standard application.
It's trivial to mount a drive so it can be read, if the OS is corrupted. It's possible to resurrect a drive for long enough to make a copy. And it's possible to send the drive off to a recovery expert if the management is willing to pay for it.
My tone? You started this conversation accusing me of slighting Joe User, which has nothing to do with my original statement, and then you persist in trying to point out my "hypocrisy" in saying that users with special privileges won't get special treatment!
And no, I don't believe that it is IT's job to spoonfeed users. That is old thinking. You should be teaching them to do basic tasks themselves. 70% of the IT work here is in developing and deploying new systems, and the rest of the work is split between maintenance and user support.
We lock down the average user to the point where there is effectively no way that they can break their system. If it gets broken, we switch it out with an identical system and they're up and running again in no time, because all their files and emails are stored remotely.
The users who require more access are granted it, but they are not given extra tech support. They want a fresh system, no problem. But they never want that, because that would be just the beginning of their work.
And my value is creating new things; some of which help employees do their jobs, and some of which remove the need for anyone to do that job. One day I may automate myself out of a job; it's certainly possible. But it's a lot better than trying to manufacture a job for myself by fostering a culture of dependence.
That must be some blazing fast connectivity you've got there. VPN is great for remote users, but in most environments the performance hit is prohibitive.
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The real issue with a WAP is that it is constantly inviting people to use it! It's broadcasting, offering to automatically set you up!
If someone just dropped off money, or a house, or a member of the preferred sex that fit your need, and that was eager to fill that need, what grounds for complaint could there be?
Blah blah blah. If I go down town for lunch with my laptop, and I open it up and see that there are a dozen available wireless connections, am I forbidden from using them. How about if I know that most of the downtown restaurants offer free wireless?
This is the case where I live, but it ain't all that savvy a town, so a lot of the points aren't well labeled. I can guess that the strongest wireless signal is from the restaurant I'm in, but it could be from one of the dozen loft apartments on the second floor of the building, or it could be from a restaurant across the street.
Am I supposed to not use the internet because I can't tell where the hell the signal is coming from, when I know that at least some of the signals are open on purpose?
This is the kind of crap that people like you want to stick the rest of us with. Open up your laptop, get signal, and then have to wander around trying to find out where the hell its coming from and if it's okay to use! Jesus, it'd be easier if they just provided ethernet cables.
The burden of security HAS to be on the provider of the service. Otherwise the whole system is worthless.
Same analogy as always, and as always it's bad.
An open WAP isn't an open door; it is an open door, with a door man who gives you a key and a room number, and this door man is constantly shouting over a loudspeaker that there are rooms available to anyone who will listen.
In that case, if someone came in, would you blame them?
Nobody is saying you have to share, but if you leave an open access point, don't cry because someone uses it.
Horseshit.
If I left my money, house, or girlfriend available on your property, I wouldn't really feel like I could complain if you helped yourself...That's what these people are doing. If I have a neighbor whose signal is strong enough to cause interference on my equipment, I feel no qualms about using his service.
If the WAP isn't even trivially secured, then that's an open invitation, same as having an FM radio signal crossing my property is an open invitation to monitor it. If you don't want other people to use it, don't leave it wide open.
I had a friend who did a CS project codenamed "The Unstoppable Sex Machine"; basically it spidered porn sites and downloaded the free images.
I always think about that in terms of that piece of entrapment...We all thought the USM was a lark, and we installed it a number of places for amusement value. It's just hard to imagine that, these days, that could have sent someone to jail.
Dems always suck on IP issues and censorship. That's been the case for decades. They think of the children waaaay too much.
On the other hand, republicans also suck for censorship (dems hate violence, repubs hate boobies), and they are far more likely to get "decency-style" laws passed, than infringe on individual liberty...If you can't buy booze on a Sunday in your state, somewhere, there is a Republican to thank.
I'm pretty sure it's in solar orbit, so of course it's possible. Probably be easier to do the sci-fi thing and strap a booster on it the next time around if that's what we want to do.
The big problem right now is that we can't predict what it's going to do with 100% accuracy...Screwing with it at this stage could queer things either way.
Obviously Apophis is not in Earth orbit, so the funnel analogy is not exact.
Still, small deflections in space are more measurable than deflections ground side. As narrow as the margin is, we don't want to screw with it if at all possible.
Well, it's not really like NASA would take some person's calculations, glance at them, and say, "Yup, he's right." If nothing else, it's terrible science, because you won't have put any real rigor into the check.
I'm agreeing on the BS call. If NASA agreed, NASA wouldn't just pass off some quote to a German newspaper. They'd have a press conference.
You ever go to the mall and drop a quarter in one of those funnel things? You know how it rolls around and around? Now, imagine putting something in front of the quarter...What will happen?
It'll slow down slightly, and the loss in speed will cause it to zip down the funnel.
That's what we're dealing with here. If this thing loses enough velocity, our gravity well will suck it in. If we could give it a push as it is on it's way past us, sure, we could get rid of it, but putting things in front of it is always going to be bad for us.
What use is that if they're sending from hotmail? That domain is ancient by internet standards.
I think they're both to blame, frankly. On the one hand you have the CTO who is just pushing his crap product out the door on Friday and scoffing at the idea of training his support people.
And then you have the support guy who is passive aggressively telling his staff to badger the developer staff (in effect, throwing off his frustration with the CTO on them) and then failing to hash out the issue with his boss on Monday. It's his ass on the line! He needs to either stand up to his boss, he needs to go over his boss to his bosses boss and get him to assert some control over the CTO, or he needs to quit.
It's certainly doing his career prospects no good, and "It's not my fault" only goes so far for both of them.
The internal AC UID is 666, so yea, you're all l33t and crap.
That's what I was thinking, though it does sound like the support guys were just funneling the calls straight to the developers, which is pretty passive aggressive.
I think someone needs to sit them both down and knock heads. You can't have two halves of the team doing this sort of snippy crap; it impacts the customers, and that just can't be allowed.
Where I work, IT is full of empty space, most of all. We've lost about 70% of our staff since the 90's.
So no, we couldn't bring it all down to IT to support every new application: we don't have the manpower.
Now, when I got here, this shortage of manpower had resulted in draconian policies toward installed applications, because there weren't enough people to fix all the problems with the regular applications, more less user-installed stuff.
Now, instead of treating the users like children, we teach them to solve their own problems. We teach certain users to be able to solve other users problems. And we allow a very few users access to the sort of resources that normally belong solely to IT, and with those resources comes an expectation that they will use those freedoms wisely, and that they will be expected to maintain anything they install that is not part of our standard software package.
I still have tons of headaches, but comparatively few of those headaches are user related, and we have a lot fewer complaints.
Call it adversarial if you like.
You never know. I've had bad wifi experiences where there was no budget to do it the right way and serious concerns about doing it the wrong way, and they went ahead and did it and caused a shitstorm that went all the way to the network overlord for our half of the country and caused a bunch of draconian policy shifts which EVERYONE hates.
That was an issue with access to a protected network, but still...Sometimes you just can't get what you want.
I doubt it. IT generally moves at a faster pace than the users, in terms of OS, and common applications...At least we do here...Every time I hear about a shop that is "standardized" on IE 5.5 or some shit, I throw up a little.
.pm's go tits up...That's just not my problem. I may feel for ya, but we had an agreement.
But still, I'm forever dealing with people who are trying to "show" me things like Google Docs. Yea, wow, I know, it's been out forever. Now tell me how you're going to make it SOX compliant. There are reasons we use certain applications.
Generally we get more resistance when we're introducing new software than we do complaints about not using new-er software, and most of the time when we get complaints about not using newer software it's stuff we wish with all our hearts we WERE using (and sometimes its stuff we have installed on our machines so we can get used to using it by the time the budget money for the upgrade materializes).
What I'm talking about is more in terms of development environment crap. You upgrade activeperl on your system and all your hand-compiled
I taught a guy a lot about how to not have that problem, after he had that problem, and I even loaned him a machine that he could use to host his apps while he un-borked his system...But I didn't fix it for him, and he didn't ask me to because we had a long discussion before I agreed to let him do his thing.
I'm not a mean guy, and I still do a certain amount of hand-holding (well, okay, I delegate the hand-holding to other people...but it gets done)...But for users who want real access to the systems? You have got to prove you deserve it.
If someone from IT came to me and asked me to help them fix their screwed up system, I'd laugh at 'em. Some people may not be great at it, but we all maintain our own junk, and I expect the same from the other users we allow to admin their own machines.
I don't think that's unreasonable.
You're speculating. It's an engineering building; maybe someone upstairs is doing experiments and wants to minimize possible interference.
I'm just saying that without knowing why the request was denied you can't say that putting in WIFI was a good thing, or that the IT department was dropping the ball.
Oh for fucks sake. If they broke the OS. If they screwed up the system. I bet you're a real blast to work with.
You know how often I've had trouble with a power user this year? Never. Because I only give those permissions to competent people. Had one guy wipe out his system last year, and he worked 5 hours off the clock to set it right, because he knew it was his responsibility, and it meant more to him that he kept his privileges than the extra work did.
That is a productive employee, not one of the children you babysit.
Welllll, since the post I was responding to was from a guy talking about how people had set up WIFI covertly after IT had denied their request, I don't see how it's me whining rather than me pointing out issues that might have been a problem with an unauthorized install.
Speaking just for myself, I agree with you, there are a lot of ways to do it right.
How is that a contradiction? It's not unusual support to grab a handful of files off the local machine. It's just as likely that those files were lost due to hardware failure...Are you suggesting that we'd just ignore that?
There is a world of difference between that and supporting a non-standard application.
It's trivial to mount a drive so it can be read, if the OS is corrupted. It's possible to resurrect a drive for long enough to make a copy. And it's possible to send the drive off to a recovery expert if the management is willing to pay for it.
My tone? You started this conversation accusing me of slighting Joe User, which has nothing to do with my original statement, and then you persist in trying to point out my "hypocrisy" in saying that users with special privileges won't get special treatment!
And no, I don't believe that it is IT's job to spoonfeed users. That is old thinking. You should be teaching them to do basic tasks themselves. 70% of the IT work here is in developing and deploying new systems, and the rest of the work is split between maintenance and user support.
We lock down the average user to the point where there is effectively no way that they can break their system. If it gets broken, we switch it out with an identical system and they're up and running again in no time, because all their files and emails are stored remotely.
The users who require more access are granted it, but they are not given extra tech support. They want a fresh system, no problem. But they never want that, because that would be just the beginning of their work.
And my value is creating new things; some of which help employees do their jobs, and some of which remove the need for anyone to do that job. One day I may automate myself out of a job; it's certainly possible. But it's a lot better than trying to manufacture a job for myself by fostering a culture of dependence.
That must be some blazing fast connectivity you've got there. VPN is great for remote users, but in most environments the performance hit is prohibitive.