Who dual-boots? A small subsection of the "geek crowd" who have some kind of moral objection with owning more than one PC ("but, I run Linux, I don't need a hundred servers to do the job of one!") or are too poor to do so. True geeks have more than one PC and find dual-booting to be annoying. That leaves the bulk majority of PC users: home owners and corporations. How many of them dual boot? Exactly. So, you've been shut out. Who cares as long as everyone else (the ones who really NEED to be protected automatically) are protected from not only harming themselves, but others. For a group so concerned with security, and bashing on endusers inability to grasp even the simplest technical knowledge, it never ceases to amaze me how quickly the complain when someone makes it easy on the people most needing of someone to lock their system down for them. Yeah, it's a runon. That's what you get when you read this far down in the comments section. Nosebleeds of comments, baby.
Ironically, I just had a similar conversation with my mother recently (who's worked in the health insurance industry for the last 35 years):
Gonna give you a lesson in group health insurance. When you are dealing with a "large" group (usually 50 or more employees), there is a provision for guaranteed issue for all new enrollees, regardless of their health situation. If someone does not accept coverage when it's offered, and they try to get on later, they are subject to evidence of their insurability.
In other words, your situation isn't unique, just not as wide-spread as you'd like people to believe. Regardless, the dirty little secret of the insurance industry is that we already have public healthcare, we just call it "higher insurance premiums for the insured".
...and don't have to deal with stupid shit like this. It might cost a little more (money), but it's worth it (in terms of time wasted dealing with stupid shit).
I'll continue to buy Winders because everything else is crapity crap crap. OSX? It's like a pretty, but dumb girl: fun in the sack for a short time, but long term commitments just become too frustrating. Linux? Yeah, been there, done that. It's called 1996, please catch up, Little Penguin.
Oh, and aside from a machine with a true, physical hardware failure, I ain't seen a BSOD since the last century. Try reading a manual or two or go back to flipping burgers.
Alas, I'm not too young to remember Putt. He was a was a "hippie technologist" then, he still is (in terms of his writing). If anything, all you've done is prove my point. Here's the quote you can use when quoting how I see someone who listens to Putt: "It's another case of the blind leading the stupid".
Here's the thing, OSX or Linux someday manage to become the dominant OS, I'll still probably stick with Windows simply because I want to actually be able to DO stuff with my computer without having to tell it how to do every little thing. They're nice enough OSes for non-technical users, but I need more power, sorry.
Then, don't bitch about it. I'm so tired of hearing tech people bitch that they don't "want" to be in management, and then bitch about how management doesn't do what THEY think is the right thing. Here's the real reason you're not in management: you wouldn't get the job. You're too short-sighted, and can't see beyond what you read on Slashdot. Here are the real reasons managers (and tech people who know what they're doing) choose Windows as a platform: applications that use it integrate better with other applications that are written for the platform and it's generally better in terms of performance, security and ease of use. Before you blast me, get a clue. Those of us who know what we're doing understand security better than any Unix nitwit, and things like viruses and spyware and other real security threats are non-issues.
Although, for me, the real reason to replace our aging Unix systems with Windows boxes is primarily to get rid of the Unix SAs. The days of inflexible, non-technical SAs is over. We need people who are capable of keeping up with technology and are capable of finding solutions. Of course, you could probably be the lowest form of "IT person": the programmer. I don't consider programmers IT people any more than I would consider an end-user who can create Access databases an IT person. In that case, you definitely shouldn't be deciding on the direction for your IT department since you know as much about technology as your typical HR monkey.
I'd wager that it's only a single family that this is happening with. All programs have their cheats, and just because there is a cheat living near you doesn't mean that WIC isn't genuinely helping the 99+% of the other people that are on it.
My ex used to work in a supermarket as a cashier. She regularly saw this happen. I've regularly seen it happen when I came to visit. It's not just one family, I wish you'd actually had put a number on your wager. Why not check it out yourself? Get a friend and go to the local supermarket and follow those who pay with WIC out to their cars. My current gf's mother is a social worker in upstate NY, she could tell you a hundred stories of fraud for everyone person who's legitimately collecting.
Secondly, you're a little presumptuous calling out the family for driving a Mercedes Benz. They probably didn't buy it new. They could have bought it before they fell on hard times, and kept it to save money, instead of spending $20k to buy a Kia, just so they can meet your stereotype of what a person on WIC should drive. Or they could have bought it used -- a ten year old Mercedes can be cheaper than a 1 year old Ford, especially if you bought it at a police auction, or as a refurbished car after an accident.
Yeah, because it's so much more likely that all of these people have access to cheap Mercedes, Escalades and BMWs than anyone else. Last year, I was on unemployment, and I went downtown to see if I could get food stamps. My truck was the oldest vehicle in "recipient" lot. How does that happen? Oh, and BTW, on unemployment, I earned too much income to be eligible for food stamps.
Or it could have been new. She could have gotten it from her drug dealing brother. She doesn't like him dealing drugs, but she accepted the car anyway, because it allows her to get to her new job on time, instead of relying on the uncertain Mass Transit, which means she won't be fired, which is good, because the job come with health insurance, and she can't afford to pay for both rent and Jimmy's dialysis otherwise.
You really must've had to dig deep into your ass to pull that crap out of it. Here's a thought: sell the Mercedes, use the money to buy a cheaper, reliable car and invest the rest. Hmmmm...
Since you know nothing of the particular situation, it's unfair for you to disparage the entire WIC program on an isolated incident.
And, since you have an idealistic view of the world, it's unfair of you to disparage people who witness fraud on a daily basis as trying to subvert the assisting of the less fortunate. I, personally, would be happy to up my support of them, but I want to see better checks enforced. If there were one or two people stealing from the system, I could live with that. The problem is it's the other way around. The real problem is people like you who just assume the system works perfectly and allow all of this to continue. You can't grasp the simple concept that there's just not enough money to circulate around there, Robin. Get a clue, end the fraud, and there will be more money to go around for other programs. What a concept.
The ever changing doc format is one of the big drivers of Office upgrades
Really? Where? I've never heard someone say "We've got to upgrade all users to the newest office so we can have the newest file format!" Perhaps it just slips my mind since the file formats haven't changed in like 6 years and three iterations of Office. People upgrade because they want the new features, that's the only reason I've ever seen and I've been doing this far too long...
Hardly. If OpenOffice and MS Office use the same file standards, there still won't be a huge rush to OO. It sucks. I don't think anyone has anything to fear from OO for another decade or so.
2) They are getting involved with the OpenDocument group.
I love Slashdot, I really do. Since this cockamamie idea of open doc standards first came up, people have been whining about MS disinterest in doing anything with them. The moment they get involved, it's a big hoopla that they're doing it just to screw people. You ever think they're getting involved because, oh, I don't know...if this becomes a standard they'll have to support it in some way and they don't want more of the stupid shit that comes out of these kinds of standards commitees? I'll ask you this: do you work in IT? How often are IT decisions left out of your hands and decided by managers who can barely spell "computer"? How's that worked out for you?
Wow, I have never seen a better example of a shitty tech blaming everyone else for his inability to actually fix problems. I especially liked the part at the end where you admitted that you can't learn from the past either and screwed up someone else's system. I reread your post, I didn't see where you asked if they had the CD before telling them how to screw up their system. And people wonder why tech support jobs are going overseas...it's basic math: I can pay a tech $15/hour to spew stupidity, or I can pay them $5/day and get the same results. Hmmmmmm...
Aside from the unsurprising Microsoft employees' strong-arming the agenda, it was clear they had no affinity or appetite for any of our ideas.
I have to ask the question, despite my knowing the answer: is it entirely possible that your ideas sucked? There's two reasons I ask: 1) the decline in the quality of people working in IT these days and 2) I've worked with numerous MS people very closely over the years, and have always found them to be nothing but helpful, extremely knowledgeable and very personable. I still keep in regular contact with a few of them.
at the time, the hot topic was IBM's MCA bus architecture,
So, that was what? 20 years ago? 25? I'm wondering if people and companies can change over that span of time.
I didn't say it never bluescreened, just that unless you were technically inept, you didn't see it as often. You should never see it more than once per hardware platform. Unlike unix guys, I understood that a bluescreen was just an error message and I had to troubleshoot the problem to make it go away forever. How many times have you heard something along the lines of "oops, bluescreened, guess that means I need to reboot!"? Once I eliminated them on my network (of about 500 users at the time), they didn't come back. Well, no, I lie. There was one towards the end of my time there. An electrician had crossed a 120V line with the person's token ring cable. Considering most of the chips around the PCI slots had popped their tops, I wasn't going to hold NT to that bluescreen. I've only seen one or two since W2K came out.
It's only funny to unix dorks who, even in the NT 4.0 days, got lots of bluescreens because they couldn't figure out how to admin a Windows box. The fact that you don't find it funny indicates you're not a unix dork and therefore have some level of technical expertise.
Why leave if its better and cheaper to administrate?
Because it's not. Windows is install and forget. Netware required so much attention.
People wonder why Windows remains king over Linux and I think its corporate America's view that one vendor should decide everything for them as a way to cut down on costs. Meanwhile they are being robbed and price gouged.
No, it's probably got more to do with the fact that corporate america wants to actually move forward with technology, rather than continue to kludge the same 1979 OS over and over again in the hopes that someday, SOMEDAY, it might be able to match Windows-based offerings. Oh, and BTW, very few businesses are "married" to one vendor. I've been to manys a requirements meeting where it's discussed which direction to travel. Windows just generally provides the greatest amount of flexibility, performance, security and stability with the least amount of administrative setup. It's usually an easy sell when someone on our Unix team tells a project manager that they can have a machine ready for them in three weeks from when it comes in the door, and the Windows engineers tell them they can do it in three days.
Have you seen the price of MS Office? What is Apple's office suite? $79?
And? have you seen the difference in capabilities? You can buy a used Yugo for about $200, but if you really want to get places is it really going to be your first choice? You can't buy everything on price and expect to save money.
They get what they deserve. I just hope the rest of the world such as Europe and South America dont drink the MS coolaid as much.
When they finally get computers in those areas, I'm sure Linux usage will just skyrocket!
(For those who don't get it, I was making fun of him, not Europe or SA. I'm fully aware they're technologically advanced.)
When 200GB drives are under $150 maybe it's time to stop complaining at the people who dare to keep a meg of on line messages.
And, you've just shown why users should have no input as to what IT does. If you think a $150 200G hard drive is an enterprise class drive, you're sadly mistaken. the drives that are used in server-class machines (REAL server-class machines) will cost you $300 for a 36G drive (if you can still find them that small), and there's never less than two per machine. For systems designed specifically for storage, that 200G drive is probably made up of half a dozen smaller drives each costing a few hundred dollars. That's so in the unlikely event of a drive failure, you won't have to wait three days for the files to be restored, we can pull the dead drive out and slide in a new one without even taking the machine down. Most of the time, this happens without your knowledge.
On the other hand, no IT person will complain that you're keeping a meg of messages. The last time we sent out a "clean up your shit" message to the endusers, it's because we found almost a terabyte of MP3s, family vacation photos and yes even porn out on ONE of our file servers. That's when we start getting pissy.
Perhaps it's time you started to understand that the IT people work very hard, and their only reason for doing so is so that YOU don't have to work as hard. You don't like dealing with the IT department? Shut down your computer, grab a pen and paper, and refuse to do your job any other way. We'll be happy to watch you for the 30 seconds it lasts.
I know I am not alone in turning off all runtime virus protection on my PC, because it has historically had more impact on system stabilty, and speed than most virii
Nope, you're not alone. I don't typically run with AV enabled, and the last virus I had on any system was Jerusalem.:) (Before the literalli ask: I run semi-regular virus scans using one of the web-based scanners, that would be how I know for sure.)
Yes, it would be. I've seen it. There's an energy company in the northeastern US that's as close to 100% open source as you could get. They were even beginning to replace their aging Bay routers with Linux-based PCs when they were purchased. The router replacement was halted so they could be put on the corporate standard of Cisco (bleck). Aside from that, though, it was Linux, Apache, Tomcat, OpenOffice, Cyrus IMAP, etc all the way. It worked, but it was all so much duct tape and shoestrings. They had no real engineers there, it was all cobbled together by programmers. So, there were constant outages, over-engineered complexity and just pure user-level mistakes all over the place. When we brought some real engineers in, they balked at every change we wanted to make (mainly because we immediately took away their access and made them users like they should have been). But, within 3 months we had cleaned up the bulk of their problems and outages became a thing of the past. Oh, they still bitched and complained, but at least now their e-mail was up often enough for them to actually do it.:)
A juries job is to decide if a defendant is guilty of a crime. The crime is defined by a law.
Really? So, in your definition anything that is against the law is WRONG, in the moral sense? In other words, everyone who breaks a law deserves to go to jail, regardless of the "rightness" of that action? If that's the case, then what about those areas in the southern states where it is still illegal for two adults of consenting age to engage in oral sex? This is a "crime", punishable by real jail time. Think it can't happen? Tell it to the fellow sitting in a Texas jail for admitting under oath he performed oral sex on his WIFE! In those instances, it's absolutely CRITICAL that juries understand they can vote not guilty in cases like that, regardless of any other evidence.
I don't have the time to do that with every computer
Nor do I. That's the beauty of getting it right the first time...you don't need to ever worry about it again. Build 'em, rack 'em, forget 'em. I choose to work no harder than that.
I'm going to continue moving to Linux.
If it works for you, great! There's far too many things we do today that we couldn't do on Linux without a huge amount of coding.
Even Bill gets the BSOD [itvibe.com] sometimes.
Yup, so do I. I get 'em about as often, too. I think I can count the number I've had in the last 10 years on one hand. And, that's on literally thousands of servers, not just desktops.
There is no magic bullet. Any OS is only as secure as the person in charge of it has skill. You listed a huge array of defenses against the bad stuff, but your users still manage to bring things in. The problem, I think, is you're relying too much on technology to fight technology. All of your defenses are great, but they should be a last line of defense, one that reports to you that there's a problem, not be the solution.
It's ok, I once thought the problem was the software, then I realized it was me. So, I figured out what I was doing wrong and corrected it. Here's the first step: what OS do you think Bill Gates uses? Now, ask yourself, do you think the techs that maintain his machine, or the developers who write his software, can say "Well, it's Windows, what do you expect?" Well, if they can't say it, why should you? Take that hammer out of your toolbox, things become a lot clearer.
Slashdot Mirror
Who dual-boots? A small subsection of the "geek crowd" who have some kind of moral objection with owning more than one PC ("but, I run Linux, I don't need a hundred servers to do the job of one!") or are too poor to do so. True geeks have more than one PC and find dual-booting to be annoying. That leaves the bulk majority of PC users: home owners and corporations. How many of them dual boot? Exactly. So, you've been shut out. Who cares as long as everyone else (the ones who really NEED to be protected automatically) are protected from not only harming themselves, but others. For a group so concerned with security, and bashing on endusers inability to grasp even the simplest technical knowledge, it never ceases to amaze me how quickly the complain when someone makes it easy on the people most needing of someone to lock their system down for them. Yeah, it's a runon. That's what you get when you read this far down in the comments section. Nosebleeds of comments, baby.
Ironically, I just had a similar conversation with my mother recently (who's worked in the health insurance industry for the last 35 years):
Gonna give you a lesson in group health insurance. When you are dealing with a "large" group (usually 50 or more employees), there is a provision for guaranteed issue for all new enrollees, regardless of their health situation. If someone does not accept coverage when it's offered, and they try to get on later, they are subject to evidence of their insurability.
In other words, your situation isn't unique, just not as wide-spread as you'd like people to believe. Regardless, the dirty little secret of the insurance industry is that we already have public healthcare, we just call it "higher insurance premiums for the insured".
I really don't understand why people vote for politicians who are bought & sold so easily (and cheaply).
Because you miss the fundamental flaw of representative democracy: you get people who are representative of the democracy.
...and don't have to deal with stupid shit like this. It might cost a little more (money), but it's worth it (in terms of time wasted dealing with stupid shit).
I'll continue to buy Winders because everything else is crapity crap crap. OSX? It's like a pretty, but dumb girl: fun in the sack for a short time, but long term commitments just become too frustrating. Linux? Yeah, been there, done that. It's called 1996, please catch up, Little Penguin.
Oh, and aside from a machine with a true, physical hardware failure, I ain't seen a BSOD since the last century. Try reading a manual or two or go back to flipping burgers.
Alas, I'm not too young to remember Putt. He was a was a "hippie technologist" then, he still is (in terms of his writing). If anything, all you've done is prove my point. Here's the quote you can use when quoting how I see someone who listens to Putt: "It's another case of the blind leading the stupid".
What passes for news these days...
Here's the thing, OSX or Linux someday manage to become the dominant OS, I'll still probably stick with Windows simply because I want to actually be able to DO stuff with my computer without having to tell it how to do every little thing. They're nice enough OSes for non-technical users, but I need more power, sorry.
but the rest of us don't want to be in management
Then, don't bitch about it. I'm so tired of hearing tech people bitch that they don't "want" to be in management, and then bitch about how management doesn't do what THEY think is the right thing. Here's the real reason you're not in management: you wouldn't get the job. You're too short-sighted, and can't see beyond what you read on Slashdot. Here are the real reasons managers (and tech people who know what they're doing) choose Windows as a platform: applications that use it integrate better with other applications that are written for the platform and it's generally better in terms of performance, security and ease of use. Before you blast me, get a clue. Those of us who know what we're doing understand security better than any Unix nitwit, and things like viruses and spyware and other real security threats are non-issues.
Although, for me, the real reason to replace our aging Unix systems with Windows boxes is primarily to get rid of the Unix SAs. The days of inflexible, non-technical SAs is over. We need people who are capable of keeping up with technology and are capable of finding solutions. Of course, you could probably be the lowest form of "IT person": the programmer. I don't consider programmers IT people any more than I would consider an end-user who can create Access databases an IT person. In that case, you definitely shouldn't be deciding on the direction for your IT department since you know as much about technology as your typical HR monkey.
Do not judge lest you be judged, asshole.
Here comes yours now...
I'd wager that it's only a single family that this is happening with. All programs have their cheats, and just because there is a cheat living near you doesn't mean that WIC isn't genuinely helping the 99+% of the other people that are on it.
My ex used to work in a supermarket as a cashier. She regularly saw this happen. I've regularly seen it happen when I came to visit. It's not just one family, I wish you'd actually had put a number on your wager. Why not check it out yourself? Get a friend and go to the local supermarket and follow those who pay with WIC out to their cars. My current gf's mother is a social worker in upstate NY, she could tell you a hundred stories of fraud for everyone person who's legitimately collecting.
Secondly, you're a little presumptuous calling out the family for driving a Mercedes Benz. They probably didn't buy it new. They could have bought it before they fell on hard times, and kept it to save money, instead of spending $20k to buy a Kia, just so they can meet your stereotype of what a person on WIC should drive. Or they could have bought it used -- a ten year old Mercedes can be cheaper than a 1 year old Ford, especially if you bought it at a police auction, or as a refurbished car after an accident.
Yeah, because it's so much more likely that all of these people have access to cheap Mercedes, Escalades and BMWs than anyone else. Last year, I was on unemployment, and I went downtown to see if I could get food stamps. My truck was the oldest vehicle in "recipient" lot. How does that happen? Oh, and BTW, on unemployment, I earned too much income to be eligible for food stamps.
Or it could have been new. She could have gotten it from her drug dealing brother. She doesn't like him dealing drugs, but she accepted the car anyway, because it allows her to get to her new job on time, instead of relying on the uncertain Mass Transit, which means she won't be fired, which is good, because the job come with health insurance, and she can't afford to pay for both rent and Jimmy's dialysis otherwise.
You really must've had to dig deep into your ass to pull that crap out of it. Here's a thought: sell the Mercedes, use the money to buy a cheaper, reliable car and invest the rest. Hmmmm...
Since you know nothing of the particular situation, it's unfair for you to disparage the entire WIC program on an isolated incident.
And, since you have an idealistic view of the world, it's unfair of you to disparage people who witness fraud on a daily basis as trying to subvert the assisting of the less fortunate. I, personally, would be happy to up my support of them, but I want to see better checks enforced. If there were one or two people stealing from the system, I could live with that. The problem is it's the other way around. The real problem is people like you who just assume the system works perfectly and allow all of this to continue. You can't grasp the simple concept that there's just not enough money to circulate around there, Robin. Get a clue, end the fraud, and there will be more money to go around for other programs. What a concept.
The ever changing doc format is one of the big drivers of Office upgrades
Really? Where? I've never heard someone say "We've got to upgrade all users to the newest office so we can have the newest file format!" Perhaps it just slips my mind since the file formats haven't changed in like 6 years and three iterations of Office. People upgrade because they want the new features, that's the only reason I've ever seen and I've been doing this far too long...
1) Open standards are bad for their monopoly.
Hardly. If OpenOffice and MS Office use the same file standards, there still won't be a huge rush to OO. It sucks. I don't think anyone has anything to fear from OO for another decade or so.
2) They are getting involved with the OpenDocument group.
I love Slashdot, I really do. Since this cockamamie idea of open doc standards first came up, people have been whining about MS disinterest in doing anything with them. The moment they get involved, it's a big hoopla that they're doing it just to screw people. You ever think they're getting involved because, oh, I don't know...if this becomes a standard they'll have to support it in some way and they don't want more of the stupid shit that comes out of these kinds of standards commitees? I'll ask you this: do you work in IT? How often are IT decisions left out of your hands and decided by managers who can barely spell "computer"? How's that worked out for you?
3) What do you think?
Put down the bong, paranoia ain't attractive.
Wow, I have never seen a better example of a shitty tech blaming everyone else for his inability to actually fix problems. I especially liked the part at the end where you admitted that you can't learn from the past either and screwed up someone else's system. I reread your post, I didn't see where you asked if they had the CD before telling them how to screw up their system. And people wonder why tech support jobs are going overseas...it's basic math: I can pay a tech $15/hour to spew stupidity, or I can pay them $5/day and get the same results. Hmmmmmm...
Aside from the unsurprising Microsoft employees' strong-arming the agenda, it was clear they had no affinity or appetite for any of our ideas.
I have to ask the question, despite my knowing the answer: is it entirely possible that your ideas sucked? There's two reasons I ask: 1) the decline in the quality of people working in IT these days and 2) I've worked with numerous MS people very closely over the years, and have always found them to be nothing but helpful, extremely knowledgeable and very personable. I still keep in regular contact with a few of them.
at the time, the hot topic was IBM's MCA bus architecture,
So, that was what? 20 years ago? 25? I'm wondering if people and companies can change over that span of time.
I didn't say it never bluescreened, just that unless you were technically inept, you didn't see it as often. You should never see it more than once per hardware platform. Unlike unix guys, I understood that a bluescreen was just an error message and I had to troubleshoot the problem to make it go away forever. How many times have you heard something along the lines of "oops, bluescreened, guess that means I need to reboot!"? Once I eliminated them on my network (of about 500 users at the time), they didn't come back. Well, no, I lie. There was one towards the end of my time there. An electrician had crossed a 120V line with the person's token ring cable. Considering most of the chips around the PCI slots had popped their tops, I wasn't going to hold NT to that bluescreen. I've only seen one or two since W2K came out.
It's only funny to unix dorks who, even in the NT 4.0 days, got lots of bluescreens because they couldn't figure out how to admin a Windows box. The fact that you don't find it funny indicates you're not a unix dork and therefore have some level of technical expertise.
It's DTP for people without graphic design skills, not an Office suite
And thus, the reason it's not a suite used in an office.
Why leave if its better and cheaper to administrate?
Because it's not. Windows is install and forget. Netware required so much attention.
People wonder why Windows remains king over Linux and I think its corporate America's view that one vendor should decide everything for them as a way to cut down on costs. Meanwhile they are being robbed and price gouged.
No, it's probably got more to do with the fact that corporate america wants to actually move forward with technology, rather than continue to kludge the same 1979 OS over and over again in the hopes that someday, SOMEDAY, it might be able to match Windows-based offerings. Oh, and BTW, very few businesses are "married" to one vendor. I've been to manys a requirements meeting where it's discussed which direction to travel. Windows just generally provides the greatest amount of flexibility, performance, security and stability with the least amount of administrative setup. It's usually an easy sell when someone on our Unix team tells a project manager that they can have a machine ready for them in three weeks from when it comes in the door, and the Windows engineers tell them they can do it in three days.
Have you seen the price of MS Office? What is Apple's office suite? $79?
And? have you seen the difference in capabilities? You can buy a used Yugo for about $200, but if you really want to get places is it really going to be your first choice? You can't buy everything on price and expect to save money.
They get what they deserve. I just hope the rest of the world such as Europe and South America dont drink the MS coolaid as much.
When they finally get computers in those areas, I'm sure Linux usage will just skyrocket!
(For those who don't get it, I was making fun of him, not Europe or SA. I'm fully aware they're technologically advanced.)
..I can live with that.
When 200GB drives are under $150 maybe it's time to stop complaining at the people who dare to keep a meg of on line messages.
And, you've just shown why users should have no input as to what IT does. If you think a $150 200G hard drive is an enterprise class drive, you're sadly mistaken. the drives that are used in server-class machines (REAL server-class machines) will cost you $300 for a 36G drive (if you can still find them that small), and there's never less than two per machine. For systems designed specifically for storage, that 200G drive is probably made up of half a dozen smaller drives each costing a few hundred dollars. That's so in the unlikely event of a drive failure, you won't have to wait three days for the files to be restored, we can pull the dead drive out and slide in a new one without even taking the machine down. Most of the time, this happens without your knowledge.
On the other hand, no IT person will complain that you're keeping a meg of messages. The last time we sent out a "clean up your shit" message to the endusers, it's because we found almost a terabyte of MP3s, family vacation photos and yes even porn out on ONE of our file servers. That's when we start getting pissy.
Perhaps it's time you started to understand that the IT people work very hard, and their only reason for doing so is so that YOU don't have to work as hard. You don't like dealing with the IT department? Shut down your computer, grab a pen and paper, and refuse to do your job any other way. We'll be happy to watch you for the 30 seconds it lasts.
I know I am not alone in turning off all runtime virus protection on my PC, because it has historically had more impact on system stabilty, and speed than most virii
:) (Before the literalli ask: I run semi-regular virus scans using one of the web-based scanners, that would be how I know for sure.)
Nope, you're not alone. I don't typically run with AV enabled, and the last virus I had on any system was Jerusalem.
Also very complicated
:)
Yes, it would be. I've seen it. There's an energy company in the northeastern US that's as close to 100% open source as you could get. They were even beginning to replace their aging Bay routers with Linux-based PCs when they were purchased. The router replacement was halted so they could be put on the corporate standard of Cisco (bleck). Aside from that, though, it was Linux, Apache, Tomcat, OpenOffice, Cyrus IMAP, etc all the way. It worked, but it was all so much duct tape and shoestrings. They had no real engineers there, it was all cobbled together by programmers. So, there were constant outages, over-engineered complexity and just pure user-level mistakes all over the place. When we brought some real engineers in, they balked at every change we wanted to make (mainly because we immediately took away their access and made them users like they should have been). But, within 3 months we had cleaned up the bulk of their problems and outages became a thing of the past. Oh, they still bitched and complained, but at least now their e-mail was up often enough for them to actually do it.
Step 1: get rid of the orangutan
Step 2: ???
Step 3: Who cares? The orangutan is gone!
A juries job is to decide if a defendant is guilty of a crime. The crime is defined by a law.
Really? So, in your definition anything that is against the law is WRONG, in the moral sense? In other words, everyone who breaks a law deserves to go to jail, regardless of the "rightness" of that action? If that's the case, then what about those areas in the southern states where it is still illegal for two adults of consenting age to engage in oral sex? This is a "crime", punishable by real jail time. Think it can't happen? Tell it to the fellow sitting in a Texas jail for admitting under oath he performed oral sex on his WIFE! In those instances, it's absolutely CRITICAL that juries understand they can vote not guilty in cases like that, regardless of any other evidence.
I don't have the time to do that with every computer
Nor do I. That's the beauty of getting it right the first time...you don't need to ever worry about it again. Build 'em, rack 'em, forget 'em. I choose to work no harder than that.
I'm going to continue moving to Linux.
If it works for you, great! There's far too many things we do today that we couldn't do on Linux without a huge amount of coding.
Even Bill gets the BSOD [itvibe.com] sometimes.
Yup, so do I. I get 'em about as often, too. I think I can count the number I've had in the last 10 years on one hand. And, that's on literally thousands of servers, not just desktops.
Perhaps you've found a magic bullet?
There is no magic bullet. Any OS is only as secure as the person in charge of it has skill. You listed a huge array of defenses against the bad stuff, but your users still manage to bring things in. The problem, I think, is you're relying too much on technology to fight technology. All of your defenses are great, but they should be a last line of defense, one that reports to you that there's a problem, not be the solution.
It's ok, I once thought the problem was the software, then I realized it was me. So, I figured out what I was doing wrong and corrected it. Here's the first step: what OS do you think Bill Gates uses? Now, ask yourself, do you think the techs that maintain his machine, or the developers who write his software, can say "Well, it's Windows, what do you expect?" Well, if they can't say it, why should you? Take that hammer out of your toolbox, things become a lot clearer.