I think the schools I've worked around or been involved with have been the worst for password issues. Here's a couple examples:
1. My girlfriend's school (where she teaches), has one username "teacher" and one username "student". The passwords are "teacher" and "student". Ridiculous. Besides this school, a guy I used to work with went to work at another school and found the exact same scenario!
2. My college uses social security numbers as user ids on their main student information system. Beyond this, the passwords are the student's birthdates in MMDDYY format. Now, I know this is a little more difficult than "student" as the username, but it still isn't that tough. In some states, if you steal a driver's license, all of this is listed. Either way, I just don't like it.
The network admin skills at schools simply sucks, right along with the help desk support and everything else IT-related. Know why? Schools don't pay enough to hire real professionals and end up relying on work-study types (college) or the teacher who likes messing with it (high schools).
Final thought: we need to eliminate the need for a password in the first place. In every organization, passwords suck. If the policy is too tight, people write the passwords down; if it's not tight enough, it's easily breakable. I'm yet to see a good middle ground for the users, so it's time to eliminate the whole password idea and come up with something new.
What do you mean, a 90-120 day warranty? I get the 3 year Gold support package on every system and have had no problems from them honoring the agreements. If I have a problem, I figure out what's broken, email their product support, and have the replacement within 2 days every time (that is if I call after a certain time, after which DHL will take another day.)
Sometimes the word "proprietary" is thrown around too much here, too. Just because Dell has an agreement with a vendor to provide a component doesn't mean that you can't replace it with another brand of component if it fails. I've never seen a part in a Dell that I couldn't turn around and put in an HP. If you're saying "proprietary" to mean that Dell has designed the motherboard, that may be the case, but I don't know. If it is in fact this way, then good job....that's what you pay them to do.
For businesses, the cost of MS Office isn't too draining. Sure, to the folks working there (outside of the Accounting department), $500 sounds like a lot of money to put into each computer. But, when you think of the money that the company is already making overall AND the productivity of the person using that $500 piece of software, it's a small price to pay.
Now, if you are in a small business, maybe that $500 looks steep. In those cases, an alternative to MS Office is understandable. However, in a company of substantial size, $500 is pennies. You'd probably find more than that being blown daily on company expense accounts, quality assurance rejects, and unnecessary "business lunches".
Ah....yet another/.er who doesn't want something to come packaged in a system that works. If your car is a Chevy and requires a new engine would you retrofit it with a Honda engine just because you can fit it under the hood?
With all due respect to your friend, to go through all of that to use one particular program is okay if the program is irreplacable, but to do so to use KMail to check his mail is nuts. It's not like there aren't other email packages out there for the Mac (heck, use Mail that comes with it).
Then again, why do I owe your friend any respect?
Re:Exactly what *is* the Dell aversion to AMD?
on
Dell Dumping Itanium
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Has Dell ever put forth a better explanation?
And why should they have to? That's their business model and it appears to be working quite well. Plus, every time you buy a computer now and the price is 1/3 of what it was before Dell became huge, you can thank them for it. Dell sets the pricing and has lowered it for us all.
Tell someone 10 years ago that you could buy a computer for $299, use it on the Internet, get email, and use almost any productivity software, and they'd have all laughed at you. This isn't because of PCs being like TVs and DVD players; it's because Dell forced the market to lower their prices.
Ah, but in a networked situation (that is, a network with an administrator), the number of vulnerabilities is just as important. Admins are already overworked most of the time.....it doesn't help to add a bunch of patches that cannot be deployed through a centralized means.
I use Firefox everywhere, and I keep it patched myself. However, in my office, I encourage everyone to continue to use IE, as I can actually patch that through Windows Update. Unfortunately, I can't do that for Firefox.
Unless someone here knows of a Group Policy Template that I can add into Active Directory to manage Firefox settings. If you have one of those, I'll start pushing it here.
Yeah, it's moved on, but not everyone has to. My Ph.D. candidate friends in Chemical Engineering are still doing their research with FORTRAN. And I mean FORTRAN 77.
Amazing what people will do when something gets the job done, ain't it?
So what if they have "ultimate control over their source code"? I have never understood this argument when it comes to open source. Cost is one thing, at least initially, where open source looks to be the best, and it is certainly what the city is looking for. The IT guys don't make the decisions, you know some bean counter is making that call.
The IT folks there are going to have to train users and support OO before they could ever consider reprogramming it. Besides that, reprogramming the software brings about more cost (development time and resources.)
If, in a default installation, OO does the trick, it is well worth looking into for their needs. If it requires a ton of internal changes PLUS development on their own part, it cannot be worthwhile in the long run.
Who gives a shit about innovation when it comes to archiving freakin' files? I suppose that someone somewhere gives a damn about it, but as far as I'm concerned, just put a bunch of files into one file, compress it along the way, and I'm happy. Saving a meg here or there doesn't mean anything anymore. I'd imagine there's a wide open field of research for file compression algorithms or whatever, but being a file compression research engineer would be one lame-ass career!
My thing is, I've never lost anything that was important to me as it is, at least on my computer. Sure, I may have downloaded something more than once because I didn't remember where I put it, but that's not big loss to me. But I know exactly where my main files are located and it's never been a problem.
I just don't see the big deal of desktop search. Beyond this, how will Vista help my company's employees work better? I don't need prettier graphics, transparent windows, or local search capabilities (my users store everything on the network anyway).
Show me a secure journaling file system, real productivity improvements, and improved stability...that's all.
Just standardize the rack widths and the use of the square holes....I'll put it in a room as I see fit.
Raised floors and the like are great, but to "standardize" it is silly. Next thing: standardized IT personnel. This way, companies can interchange their folks with the greatest of ease!
Leaving a city of this size and importance to the US economy in the hands of Mother Nature is one thing, but to leave it for sure disaster is another. This isn't a place that we can only hope to get a few years out of here and there....if left to Mother Nature, the city could have to relocate every decade to take advantage of the deeper waters elsewhere.
I saw a neat PBS show about the delta a year or so ago. The "rivers" in the delta normally fill up and, when they do, the water just redirects to the next easy path to the Gulf. This could end up either filling New Orleans in or rerouting enough to ruin the economy there. We can't afford to chase the best route up the Mississippi....there are just too many cities depending on that trade (New Orleans, St. Louis, Louisville, Cincinnati, Pittsburg, to name a few).
I think we should invest in fixing the levee system to the best of our engineering capability and hope this kind of thing doesn't happen again. It's the only solution that will provide a stable, long-term positive economic situation for the South and Midwest.
With that being said (and I agree), ANY major in college should provide the same level of skill in the workplace. Learning the science behind the computer doesn't make you any more prepared for the next version of Linux or Windows or whatever than anyone else.
Unfortunately, you don't see many companies hire art majors for their IT jobs. I say "unfortunately" because people from other areas may bring in fresh ideas that you can't get from the regular geeky type.....
The sad thing is that this is one of the worst articles I've ever read! Not based upon content, but it is the worst piece of crap I've ever tried to follow....
Words in a row are not always sentences. Sentences in a row are not always paragraphs. Paragraphs in a row are not always articles.
It's not what "us/.'s" have to say, it's what of of you have to say.
$2100 is a freakin' drop in the bucket for any company in the world. In a few years, it will be cheap enough for everyone to buy at Circuit City, but until then, companies can shed these nickels for something this big.
/.'s like you live in a world of pathetically cheap computer geeks....the rest of us live in the real world.
I've been to 4 colleges and I've never seen anyone use the library heavily. The only students I saw in them were in freshmen orientation classes, in which they were asked to go to the library to learn about the building or some other worthless crap.
Here's the deal with undergrad education....students already have too much to read and are forced to half-ass their work anyway. Books may be checked out to get a few quotations from, but, by and large, they are unread stacks of paper.
Say I'm an English major taking 2 Lit classes in a semester. It's not rare to see 6 books as required reading per class. That's 12 books in the semester, plus a minimum of two other courses at the same time. A semester is about 4 months long. Therefore, the student is supposed to read 3 books per month plus do papers, research, and more work from other classes. It cannot happen.
I would bet that 95% of students don't read 1/2 of what they are supposed to read for their classes already. All they get is a few quotes. This being said, why keep all of the other books in the library?
Technology has changed everything, including libraries. The days of the little old lady sitting around waiting to yell at little kids are over. I think the UT decision is going to end up blazing the trail that other universities should and will follow.
I truly worry about Indiana's move. My girlfriend is a teacher in an Indiana high school....the state mandates that all graduates know how to use email in Outlook, create presentations in PowerPoint, and create basic databases in Access. (Note the names of the programs.)
Sure, they can change the computers and their policy, but there's going to be a real problem when the state legislators see that students will be doing presentations, but not with PowerPoint. I'm not sure that the politicians in Indy were made fully aware of what this contract could mean for their standard curriculum.
Right or wrong, in the real business world, PowerPoint=Presentations, Outlook=Email, Word=Word Processing, and Excel=Spreadsheets. If you ask a politician to make it such that none of his states high school grads can work in these programs, there will be major concerns.
I'm thinking that anything with a keyboard is a bad idea! Ater all, no matter where I am, I manage to get crap in mine.
For this type of project, a tablet PC would've been a better solution. Touch-sensitive screen for browsing for Alton's latest receipe, handwriting-capable notes for messages on the wall, and you can still read and write emails!
The shape would've been no more difficult. Sure, it would be a bit bigger, but no bigger than most pictures that are hung around the house, and certainly no harder to install than a medicine cabinet.
The only drawback is the fact that it would probably run Windows XP Tablet Edition. Hey, you can't win 'em all.
What do you mean that MS doesn't seem to care? They release updates regularly because they simply DO care....
For the first guy's argument that Linux is less secure because more people are using it, that's the exact argument made by pro-MS folk out there. Give me a break!
There's yet to be an perfectly secure, unbreakable system. Instead of blaming the software manufacturer or the community, how about keeping it secure using the right outside pieces? A simple firewall may not cover all bases, but it's a start. How about IDS? How about a real password policy? How about training users to think security first? If we'd do these things more often, it may not be impenetrable, but it would be more secure than any system allowed to sit wide open.
Sure, on/. (or any other forum, for that matter,) Microsoft is hated. But to say that it's one of the most hated companies is ridiculous. For nerds, maybe, but for the MILLIONS of people who've made a mint from Microsoft, I'm sure they are smiling every time they hear that Windows boot-up song.
People have a tendency to love something until it gets too big, and then they start to hate it. A second example of this is Wal-Mart. To think that Wal-Mart does anything in their stores that K-Mart doesn't do is ridiculous....you get the same products from the same departments in both places. Wal-Mart, though, did make their supply chain work better and used technology the right way, therefore saving them money. That's why Wal-Mart is now the king. So, people hate Wal-Mart now because it's too big. Makes no sense to me.
I'm a Mac user at home and a Windows user at work. Would I use Macs at work if I could? Well, of course, but until that happens, people need to get a life and get over their hatred of MS....after all, a lot of you reading/. are doing so from your Windows XP machine, whether you admit it or not. I am.
IM doesn't hold a place in all aspects of all businesses. At my company, we only have one department in which everyone works on the same types of problems; in that area, though, there are only 8 people and they sit within a rubber band shot from each other.
The only IM users here are those who've installed it on their own and talk to their siblings/kids/parents/friends during work time. I've tried it as a pilot project for some other folks to get them to use it instead of email, but it was never used, and the pop-up little message would get on their nerves.
We do have a few travellers who use it to keep in touch while they are overseas and some purchasing agents who use it to speak to vendors in Asia, so that's nice anyway.
I, however, will stick to email at work. Only my boss expects an immediate answer, so he'll just have to deal. Everyone else knows I'm a busy dude....
Overall, I can see it's value in some ways, but for most of my users, they can use the phone.
I'll call BS on this one. If you are to use VMWare, you're going to be out the cost of a Windows license, too. Maybe not with Wine, but, then again, that doesn't work perfectly, which, in a corporate environment, matters A LOT.
Office on the Mac works great. Face it, MS Office is in the background of every business, whether you think so or not. Since it works on the Mac, Microsoft continues to develop it on a Mac, and OS X is so user-friendly, choosing Apple is easy.
"2x as much on hardware" is BS, too. In the corporate world, you can't afford to run a business on some home-built white box POS; you must have a company supporting the product. To buy comparable hardware from any PC vendor to what is in a Mac, the price is totally comparable.
The iMacs run about $1200 each, but if you buy in volume, that is probably even less. These have everything you need, plus they're sweet as hell. If I started my own IT department today, that's what I'd go with.
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I think the schools I've worked around or been involved with have been the worst for password issues. Here's a couple examples: 1. My girlfriend's school (where she teaches), has one username "teacher" and one username "student". The passwords are "teacher" and "student". Ridiculous. Besides this school, a guy I used to work with went to work at another school and found the exact same scenario! 2. My college uses social security numbers as user ids on their main student information system. Beyond this, the passwords are the student's birthdates in MMDDYY format. Now, I know this is a little more difficult than "student" as the username, but it still isn't that tough. In some states, if you steal a driver's license, all of this is listed. Either way, I just don't like it. The network admin skills at schools simply sucks, right along with the help desk support and everything else IT-related. Know why? Schools don't pay enough to hire real professionals and end up relying on work-study types (college) or the teacher who likes messing with it (high schools). Final thought: we need to eliminate the need for a password in the first place. In every organization, passwords suck. If the policy is too tight, people write the passwords down; if it's not tight enough, it's easily breakable. I'm yet to see a good middle ground for the users, so it's time to eliminate the whole password idea and come up with something new.
What do you mean, a 90-120 day warranty? I get the 3 year Gold support package on every system and have had no problems from them honoring the agreements. If I have a problem, I figure out what's broken, email their product support, and have the replacement within 2 days every time (that is if I call after a certain time, after which DHL will take another day.)
Sometimes the word "proprietary" is thrown around too much here, too. Just because Dell has an agreement with a vendor to provide a component doesn't mean that you can't replace it with another brand of component if it fails. I've never seen a part in a Dell that I couldn't turn around and put in an HP. If you're saying "proprietary" to mean that Dell has designed the motherboard, that may be the case, but I don't know. If it is in fact this way, then good job....that's what you pay them to do.
For businesses, the cost of MS Office isn't too draining. Sure, to the folks working there (outside of the Accounting department), $500 sounds like a lot of money to put into each computer. But, when you think of the money that the company is already making overall AND the productivity of the person using that $500 piece of software, it's a small price to pay. Now, if you are in a small business, maybe that $500 looks steep. In those cases, an alternative to MS Office is understandable. However, in a company of substantial size, $500 is pennies. You'd probably find more than that being blown daily on company expense accounts, quality assurance rejects, and unnecessary "business lunches".
Ah....yet another /.er who doesn't want something to come packaged in a system that works. If your car is a Chevy and requires a new engine would you retrofit it with a Honda engine just because you can fit it under the hood?
With all due respect to your friend, to go through all of that to use one particular program is okay if the program is irreplacable, but to do so to use KMail to check his mail is nuts. It's not like there aren't other email packages out there for the Mac (heck, use Mail that comes with it).
Then again, why do I owe your friend any respect?
Has Dell ever put forth a better explanation?
And why should they have to? That's their business model and it appears to be working quite well. Plus, every time you buy a computer now and the price is 1/3 of what it was before Dell became huge, you can thank them for it. Dell sets the pricing and has lowered it for us all.
Tell someone 10 years ago that you could buy a computer for $299, use it on the Internet, get email, and use almost any productivity software, and they'd have all laughed at you. This isn't because of PCs being like TVs and DVD players; it's because Dell forced the market to lower their prices.
Ah, but in a networked situation (that is, a network with an administrator), the number of vulnerabilities is just as important. Admins are already overworked most of the time.....it doesn't help to add a bunch of patches that cannot be deployed through a centralized means. I use Firefox everywhere, and I keep it patched myself. However, in my office, I encourage everyone to continue to use IE, as I can actually patch that through Windows Update. Unfortunately, I can't do that for Firefox. Unless someone here knows of a Group Policy Template that I can add into Active Directory to manage Firefox settings. If you have one of those, I'll start pushing it here.
Move.
Yeah, it's moved on, but not everyone has to. My Ph.D. candidate friends in Chemical Engineering are still doing their research with FORTRAN. And I mean FORTRAN 77. Amazing what people will do when something gets the job done, ain't it?
So what if they have "ultimate control over their source code"? I have never understood this argument when it comes to open source. Cost is one thing, at least initially, where open source looks to be the best, and it is certainly what the city is looking for. The IT guys don't make the decisions, you know some bean counter is making that call. The IT folks there are going to have to train users and support OO before they could ever consider reprogramming it. Besides that, reprogramming the software brings about more cost (development time and resources.) If, in a default installation, OO does the trick, it is well worth looking into for their needs. If it requires a ton of internal changes PLUS development on their own part, it cannot be worthwhile in the long run.
Who gives a shit about innovation when it comes to archiving freakin' files? I suppose that someone somewhere gives a damn about it, but as far as I'm concerned, just put a bunch of files into one file, compress it along the way, and I'm happy. Saving a meg here or there doesn't mean anything anymore. I'd imagine there's a wide open field of research for file compression algorithms or whatever, but being a file compression research engineer would be one lame-ass career!
My thing is, I've never lost anything that was important to me as it is, at least on my computer. Sure, I may have downloaded something more than once because I didn't remember where I put it, but that's not big loss to me. But I know exactly where my main files are located and it's never been a problem. I just don't see the big deal of desktop search. Beyond this, how will Vista help my company's employees work better? I don't need prettier graphics, transparent windows, or local search capabilities (my users store everything on the network anyway). Show me a secure journaling file system, real productivity improvements, and improved stability...that's all.
Who funded this standard? What a waste!
Just standardize the rack widths and the use of the square holes....I'll put it in a room as I see fit.
Raised floors and the like are great, but to "standardize" it is silly. Next thing: standardized IT personnel. This way, companies can interchange their folks with the greatest of ease!
Leaving a city of this size and importance to the US economy in the hands of Mother Nature is one thing, but to leave it for sure disaster is another. This isn't a place that we can only hope to get a few years out of here and there....if left to Mother Nature, the city could have to relocate every decade to take advantage of the deeper waters elsewhere.
I saw a neat PBS show about the delta a year or so ago. The "rivers" in the delta normally fill up and, when they do, the water just redirects to the next easy path to the Gulf. This could end up either filling New Orleans in or rerouting enough to ruin the economy there. We can't afford to chase the best route up the Mississippi....there are just too many cities depending on that trade (New Orleans, St. Louis, Louisville, Cincinnati, Pittsburg, to name a few).
I think we should invest in fixing the levee system to the best of our engineering capability and hope this kind of thing doesn't happen again. It's the only solution that will provide a stable, long-term positive economic situation for the South and Midwest.
With that being said (and I agree), ANY major in college should provide the same level of skill in the workplace. Learning the science behind the computer doesn't make you any more prepared for the next version of Linux or Windows or whatever than anyone else. Unfortunately, you don't see many companies hire art majors for their IT jobs. I say "unfortunately" because people from other areas may bring in fresh ideas that you can't get from the regular geeky type.....
The sad thing is that this is one of the worst articles I've ever read! Not based upon content, but it is the worst piece of crap I've ever tried to follow....
Words in a row are not always sentences. Sentences in a row are not always paragraphs. Paragraphs in a row are not always articles.
Uh, I hope you're on Office 2003 with the newer Outlook Data File. Otherwise, when that PST hits 2 Gigs, you're toast.
Just warning you before it happens.
It's not what "us /.'s" have to say, it's what of of you have to say.
/.'s like you live in a world of pathetically cheap computer geeks....the rest of us live in the real world.
$2100 is a freakin' drop in the bucket for any company in the world. In a few years, it will be cheap enough for everyone to buy at Circuit City, but until then, companies can shed these nickels for something this big.
I've been to 4 colleges and I've never seen anyone use the library heavily. The only students I saw in them were in freshmen orientation classes, in which they were asked to go to the library to learn about the building or some other worthless crap. Here's the deal with undergrad education....students already have too much to read and are forced to half-ass their work anyway. Books may be checked out to get a few quotations from, but, by and large, they are unread stacks of paper. Say I'm an English major taking 2 Lit classes in a semester. It's not rare to see 6 books as required reading per class. That's 12 books in the semester, plus a minimum of two other courses at the same time. A semester is about 4 months long. Therefore, the student is supposed to read 3 books per month plus do papers, research, and more work from other classes. It cannot happen. I would bet that 95% of students don't read 1/2 of what they are supposed to read for their classes already. All they get is a few quotes. This being said, why keep all of the other books in the library? Technology has changed everything, including libraries. The days of the little old lady sitting around waiting to yell at little kids are over. I think the UT decision is going to end up blazing the trail that other universities should and will follow.
I truly worry about Indiana's move. My girlfriend is a teacher in an Indiana high school....the state mandates that all graduates know how to use email in Outlook, create presentations in PowerPoint, and create basic databases in Access. (Note the names of the programs.)
Sure, they can change the computers and their policy, but there's going to be a real problem when the state legislators see that students will be doing presentations, but not with PowerPoint. I'm not sure that the politicians in Indy were made fully aware of what this contract could mean for their standard curriculum.
Right or wrong, in the real business world, PowerPoint=Presentations, Outlook=Email, Word=Word Processing, and Excel=Spreadsheets. If you ask a politician to make it such that none of his states high school grads can work in these programs, there will be major concerns.
I'm thinking that anything with a keyboard is a bad idea! Ater all, no matter where I am, I manage to get crap in mine.
For this type of project, a tablet PC would've been a better solution. Touch-sensitive screen for browsing for Alton's latest receipe, handwriting-capable notes for messages on the wall, and you can still read and write emails!
The shape would've been no more difficult. Sure, it would be a bit bigger, but no bigger than most pictures that are hung around the house, and certainly no harder to install than a medicine cabinet.
The only drawback is the fact that it would probably run Windows XP Tablet Edition. Hey, you can't win 'em all.
What do you mean that MS doesn't seem to care? They release updates regularly because they simply DO care.... For the first guy's argument that Linux is less secure because more people are using it, that's the exact argument made by pro-MS folk out there. Give me a break! There's yet to be an perfectly secure, unbreakable system. Instead of blaming the software manufacturer or the community, how about keeping it secure using the right outside pieces? A simple firewall may not cover all bases, but it's a start. How about IDS? How about a real password policy? How about training users to think security first? If we'd do these things more often, it may not be impenetrable, but it would be more secure than any system allowed to sit wide open.
Sure, on /. (or any other forum, for that matter,) Microsoft is hated. But to say that it's one of the most hated companies is ridiculous. For nerds, maybe, but for the MILLIONS of people who've made a mint from Microsoft, I'm sure they are smiling every time they hear that Windows boot-up song.
People have a tendency to love something until it gets too big, and then they start to hate it. A second example of this is Wal-Mart. To think that Wal-Mart does anything in their stores that K-Mart doesn't do is ridiculous....you get the same products from the same departments in both places. Wal-Mart, though, did make their supply chain work better and used technology the right way, therefore saving them money. That's why Wal-Mart is now the king. So, people hate Wal-Mart now because it's too big. Makes no sense to me.
I'm a Mac user at home and a Windows user at work. Would I use Macs at work if I could? Well, of course, but until that happens, people need to get a life and get over their hatred of MS....after all, a lot of you reading /. are doing so from your Windows XP machine, whether you admit it or not. I am.
IM doesn't hold a place in all aspects of all businesses. At my company, we only have one department in which everyone works on the same types of problems; in that area, though, there are only 8 people and they sit within a rubber band shot from each other. The only IM users here are those who've installed it on their own and talk to their siblings/kids/parents/friends during work time. I've tried it as a pilot project for some other folks to get them to use it instead of email, but it was never used, and the pop-up little message would get on their nerves. We do have a few travellers who use it to keep in touch while they are overseas and some purchasing agents who use it to speak to vendors in Asia, so that's nice anyway. I, however, will stick to email at work. Only my boss expects an immediate answer, so he'll just have to deal. Everyone else knows I'm a busy dude.... Overall, I can see it's value in some ways, but for most of my users, they can use the phone.
I'll call BS on this one. If you are to use VMWare, you're going to be out the cost of a Windows license, too. Maybe not with Wine, but, then again, that doesn't work perfectly, which, in a corporate environment, matters A LOT. Office on the Mac works great. Face it, MS Office is in the background of every business, whether you think so or not. Since it works on the Mac, Microsoft continues to develop it on a Mac, and OS X is so user-friendly, choosing Apple is easy. "2x as much on hardware" is BS, too. In the corporate world, you can't afford to run a business on some home-built white box POS; you must have a company supporting the product. To buy comparable hardware from any PC vendor to what is in a Mac, the price is totally comparable. The iMacs run about $1200 each, but if you buy in volume, that is probably even less. These have everything you need, plus they're sweet as hell. If I started my own IT department today, that's what I'd go with.