I bought a Synology NAS after this: https://www.techspot.com/news/.... Which is not directly related to Google Drive, but if Google had the power to do that it has the power to look into my files and determine that anything there is not appropriate. Once I purchased the NAS, everything came off the cloud including Dropbox.
Minimal maintenance. I'm still figuring out how I can have a third backup option so the data in the NAS is stored offsite, but other than that I'm a satisfied customer.
Tell them what they're going to achieve from a business perspective by using the system correctly. They really won't care about what happens behind the wall.
When you go to eat a burger, do you really care about the way the meat processing is performed? Or the way the tomatoes are picked? You trust them to do it the right way, but you don't really want to know the gory details. What you want is to have a good burger, and they have to deliver. Same with IT.
Senior Management wants the ERP system to do stuff. You enable them. Show them how that happens on their terms, not yours.
I was actually doing it the hard way, which works OK. http://danielj.se/2011/05/02/change-back-google-search-in-linux-mint/
But then after an update, it reverts back to its original behaviour. If your method works OK after Mint pushes its updates down, I won't mind switching back.
Not the browser's home page, the way it points you to Mint's version of Google search when you type a search term in the search bar. Two different things.
If it were only that, then I would agree with you. But I downloaded Chrome and it also hijacks the search from the omnibar. Yes, you could just go to google.com and search. But then, what's the point of searching from the browser bar? What's the point of having it at all?
Just read it.
So if they don't collect revenue from Google they'll block it? Or Bing?
Again, I wouldn't have a problem with this if it was unobstrusive. But, have you used their Google search? It's hideous. If they change it, I won't mind using it if it looks closer to what 'Google Default' looks like. Else, I'll just stay in Oneiric.
One reason: Mint's heavy handed tendency to replace the default Google search with a 'Mint-ized' version of Google search to draw revenue. I mean, I get it: it needs money. But if you're going to substitute something that works great (Google) with your own version of search to take eyeball money, give me something as good as or better than what I'm used to.
Granted, there are instructions out there to change this by running a couple of scripts and commands. But it would revert after updates were pushed down to the system. I had to do it at least once a month.
Disclaimer: I donated directly to Mint through PayPal, precisely because I changed the search engine knowing full well this is a way the get money. I would not mind paying a bit more and a bit regularly if they would keep their hands of my search.
Just because you and your department want a certain feature/service doesn't mean that you should have free reign in implementing and installing non-approved services in the hospital's infrastructure. You have to ask yourself why IT can't (or won't) provide this service to the community as a whole. More often than not it is a matter of money, time, risk, knowledge, business need and/or a combination of these and other factors.
The IT department is there to deliver a bunch of services that ensures that the hospital's mission and objectives are achieved. Often, these objectives conflict with what individual users, or user groups, want. God, I wish my company would allow us to connect our devices (Androids, iPhones) directly into the Exchange server, allow us to have some sort of internal social media, wikis, etc. But we don't. And we don't because the company has chosen not to. Myopic? Yes. Justified? Absolutely. It is the company's business and assets they're protecting.
So the short answer is yes. They're allowing you to play in their network? You need to give them access. What you need to do is go up to both IT and Hospital management and convince them that what you want to do is not only good for your group, but for the company as a whole. Hey, maybe you'll end up changing the way the company delivers services to your user community.
If you use TrueCrypt or other similar products to encrypt the entire hard drive I don't think this doohickey will be very effective. My laptop uses an encryption product for the entire hdd and when I boot into Ubuntu LiveCD I can't see a thing.
Bottom Line: Encrypt the entire thing and be done with it. Truecrypt FTW!
One of the main problems is also a lack of alignment between the business and IT, and perception. Often the business will want X and IT will do Y. Not because IT wants to, but because IT does not understand the business well enough. The same is true about the business. I've known of IT Managers that want a system with enough Capacity, Availability and Redundancy to fly two Shuttle Missions. But the don't really understand what they're asking for. They think stuff in IT is endless, does not break, and it's always Available.
That's why process frameworks such as ITIL and CoBIT work. I know that ITIL is a four letter word for people on both sides of the equation. But it sets expectations, a common process language and structure, and provides accountability to all.
True. And I don't think there are companies with the pockets, or the patience, to do this. Consider also that the courts in this country are not very tech savvy.
As we say back home: "I'm selling it to you at face value". The thing is that it was his ONLY argument. I knew back then, as I do know, that at least one vendor, M$, makes you sign out all liability when you accept the EULA. I could make the argument about legal action if we were talking about a hosted app, or a mission critical (read defense, power) app. But his argument was flaky at best.
A while back I remember I had a conversation with a manager guy I used to work with about OSS software. We were talking in particular about Linux, but I'd guess it would apply to MySQL. He said that companies don't go for OSS because they'd have no one to sue and/or hold accountable if the software fails. Not his literal words, but it went something like that.
This makes some sense, in a twisted sort of way. I'm not a licensing expert, but how many companies enter this sort of agreement? Big guys? SAP, Oracle?
*sniff* Bullshit. You mean to tell me this guy is using a MS beta on a production (read his personal / work) PC? Good God! How stupid must you be to do this? He couldn't at least get a spare PC to run the beta while preserving a clean XP install?
I'm sorry Paul, but I smell a big pile of Bullshit. No self loving geek, IT guy, sysadmin et al. would *EVER* run a beta, let alone a Microsoft Beta, on a production machine. Heck, I wouldn't even let a beta of any kind touch my data.
Please move along. This article is lame and devoid of content. All of those measures are well and good but does not take into consideration one thing: human stupidity. The weakest link in the chain.
Case in point: Why on God's blue earth does the VA authorized somebody to copy a database into a laptop? This happened also to other firms and companies. If I were to easily get a file from someone's PC it would be quite easy. Boot the PC with a Linux distro, mount the drive, connect a USB drive and go. No one would ever know I was there. Most users are plain stupid and don't even think about encryption or obfuscation.
Remember, in the end it all comes down to a single person doing something really stupid.
How all of this net neutrality shite will function on ISP's outside of the US? Or ISP's in the rest of the planet have to enter all of the telco's pipes to reach a site? I haven't really read elsewhere about this.
Are ISP's outside of the US watching from the fences? Imposing QOS policies in US based routers is relatively easy, are the telcos going to extort foreign ISP's as well?
A slow, painful and quiet death. The days of the Kindergarten are over. Let's put AOL alongside Prodigy and Compuserve in some museum so we can reminisce on 386 processors and 9600 baud modems.
Yes, I am paranoid. I want my data as safe as possible. I don't really want anyone to have the ability to snoop into my network, not even by accident. What's keeping these cops to pack *more* than a simple wifi sniffer? I know I would.;-)
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I bought a Synology NAS after this: https://www.techspot.com/news/.... Which is not directly related to Google Drive, but if Google had the power to do that it has the power to look into my files and determine that anything there is not appropriate. Once I purchased the NAS, everything came off the cloud including Dropbox. Minimal maintenance. I'm still figuring out how I can have a third backup option so the data in the NAS is stored offsite, but other than that I'm a satisfied customer.
Go watch the Almost Human episode "Arrythmia". Now.
Tell them what they're going to achieve from a business perspective by using the system correctly. They really won't care about what happens behind the wall.
When you go to eat a burger, do you really care about the way the meat processing is performed? Or the way the tomatoes are picked? You trust them to do it the right way, but you don't really want to know the gory details. What you want is to have a good burger, and they have to deliver. Same with IT.
Senior Management wants the ERP system to do stuff. You enable them. Show them how that happens on their terms, not yours.
I was actually doing it the hard way, which works OK. http://danielj.se/2011/05/02/change-back-google-search-in-linux-mint/ But then after an update, it reverts back to its original behaviour. If your method works OK after Mint pushes its updates down, I won't mind switching back.
Not the browser's home page, the way it points you to Mint's version of Google search when you type a search term in the search bar. Two different things. If it were only that, then I would agree with you. But I downloaded Chrome and it also hijacks the search from the omnibar. Yes, you could just go to google.com and search. But then, what's the point of searching from the browser bar? What's the point of having it at all?
Just read it. So if they don't collect revenue from Google they'll block it? Or Bing? Again, I wouldn't have a problem with this if it was unobstrusive. But, have you used their Google search? It's hideous. If they change it, I won't mind using it if it looks closer to what 'Google Default' looks like. Else, I'll just stay in Oneiric.
One reason: Mint's heavy handed tendency to replace the default Google search with a 'Mint-ized' version of Google search to draw revenue. I mean, I get it: it needs money. But if you're going to substitute something that works great (Google) with your own version of search to take eyeball money, give me something as good as or better than what I'm used to. Granted, there are instructions out there to change this by running a couple of scripts and commands. But it would revert after updates were pushed down to the system. I had to do it at least once a month. Disclaimer: I donated directly to Mint through PayPal, precisely because I changed the search engine knowing full well this is a way the get money. I would not mind paying a bit more and a bit regularly if they would keep their hands of my search.
Just because you and your department want a certain feature/service doesn't mean that you should have free reign in implementing and installing non-approved services in the hospital's infrastructure. You have to ask yourself why IT can't (or won't) provide this service to the community as a whole. More often than not it is a matter of money, time, risk, knowledge, business need and/or a combination of these and other factors. The IT department is there to deliver a bunch of services that ensures that the hospital's mission and objectives are achieved. Often, these objectives conflict with what individual users, or user groups, want. God, I wish my company would allow us to connect our devices (Androids, iPhones) directly into the Exchange server, allow us to have some sort of internal social media, wikis, etc. But we don't. And we don't because the company has chosen not to. Myopic? Yes. Justified? Absolutely. It is the company's business and assets they're protecting. So the short answer is yes. They're allowing you to play in their network? You need to give them access. What you need to do is go up to both IT and Hospital management and convince them that what you want to do is not only good for your group, but for the company as a whole. Hey, maybe you'll end up changing the way the company delivers services to your user community.
This is scary shite.
If you use TrueCrypt or other similar products to encrypt the entire hard drive I don't think this doohickey will be very effective. My laptop uses an encryption product for the entire hdd and when I boot into Ubuntu LiveCD I can't see a thing.
Bottom Line: Encrypt the entire thing and be done with it. Truecrypt FTW!
One of the main problems is also a lack of alignment between the business and IT, and perception. Often the business will want X and IT will do Y. Not because IT wants to, but because IT does not understand the business well enough. The same is true about the business. I've known of IT Managers that want a system with enough Capacity, Availability and Redundancy to fly two Shuttle Missions. But the don't really understand what they're asking for. They think stuff in IT is endless, does not break, and it's always Available.
That's why process frameworks such as ITIL and CoBIT work. I know that ITIL is a four letter word for people on both sides of the equation. But it sets expectations, a common process language and structure, and provides accountability to all.
True. And I don't think there are companies with the pockets, or the patience, to do this. Consider also that the courts in this country are not very tech savvy.
As we say back home: "I'm selling it to you at face value". The thing is that it was his ONLY argument. I knew back then, as I do know, that at least one vendor, M$, makes you sign out all liability when you accept the EULA. I could make the argument about legal action if we were talking about a hosted app, or a mission critical (read defense, power) app. But his argument was flaky at best.
A while back I remember I had a conversation with a manager guy I used to work with about OSS software. We were talking in particular about Linux, but I'd guess it would apply to MySQL. He said that companies don't go for OSS because they'd have no one to sue and/or hold accountable if the software fails. Not his literal words, but it went something like that. This makes some sense, in a twisted sort of way. I'm not a licensing expert, but how many companies enter this sort of agreement? Big guys? SAP, Oracle?
True. I lost my faith back when Windows ME was released.
!Nooooo!
*sniff* Bullshit. You mean to tell me this guy is using a MS beta on a production (read his personal / work) PC? Good God! How stupid must you be to do this? He couldn't at least get a spare PC to run the beta while preserving a clean XP install?
I'm sorry Paul, but I smell a big pile of Bullshit. No self loving geek, IT guy, sysadmin et al. would *EVER* run a beta, let alone a Microsoft Beta, on a production machine. Heck, I wouldn't even let a beta of any kind touch my data.
Rick Berman and Brannon Braga. These two should be quietly bound, gagged and dropped in the deepest pit you can find.
Please move along. This article is lame and devoid of content. All of those measures are well and good but does not take into consideration one thing: human stupidity. The weakest link in the chain.
Case in point: Why on God's blue earth does the VA authorized somebody to copy a database into a laptop? This happened also to other firms and companies. If I were to easily get a file from someone's PC it would be quite easy. Boot the PC with a Linux distro, mount the drive, connect a USB drive and go. No one would ever know I was there. Most users are plain stupid and don't even think about encryption or obfuscation.
Remember, in the end it all comes down to a single person doing something really stupid.
Please step away from the keyboard slowly. Go get a very stiff drink. Repeat often. Do not post on Slashdot until September.
How all of this net neutrality shite will function on ISP's outside of the US? Or ISP's in the rest of the planet have to enter all of the telco's pipes to reach a site? I haven't really read elsewhere about this.
Are ISP's outside of the US watching from the fences? Imposing QOS policies in US based routers is relatively easy, are the telcos going to extort foreign ISP's as well?
A slow, painful and quiet death. The days of the Kindergarten are over. Let's put AOL alongside Prodigy and Compuserve in some museum so we can reminisce on 386 processors and 9600 baud modems.
Oh, OK. Bummer. :-P
That we can have sex tomorrow?
Wait, I forget. This is Slashdot. :-P
Yes, I am paranoid. I want my data as safe as possible. I don't really want anyone to have the ability to snoop into my network, not even by accident. What's keeping these cops to pack *more* than a simple wifi sniffer? I know I would. ;-)