Basically, you need a router with 2 WAN ports and the ability to configure failover. I don't have a good recommendation, because it's a feature that generally isn't available in consumer-grade gear. Expect to spend a couple hundred dollars.
And that's just for failover. Load balancing is more complicated and often doesn't work out as well as people hope.
I'm not too angry because I see this as a move to increase the percentage of their income coming from streaming. That's the only way I see this as making sense to me: Netflix is hoping that, in a few years, they'll be a streaming-only service. that means that they'll need to make streaming more expensive (so they can pay more licensing fees to content-owners in order to increase their streaming library) and also dissuade people from receiving DVD purchases.
It's hard to determine what it means to "pay their share". If the top 5% of the income earners are paying 60% of the taxes, it makes me wonder whether they're holding on to 60% of the disposable income.
Yeah, but I would at least wonder about the methodology. Did they pick the most remote houses, difficult to lay infrastructure to, and then figure out what it would cost to lay a 100Mbps fiber line from the nearest facility? Or did they actually analyze the expenditures that have happened and determined what was actually spent? Even if there was $349,234 spent per household in some instance, is that representative of what was spent throughout the project, or is that an outlier?
It also might not be entirely fair to analyze these things based on the average income and house price. There might be other conditions, like running an Internet backbone to a particular town might enable that town to grow and become more prosperous. It might make it cheaper to run broadband to surrounding areas in the future.
RIM and Blackberry are about business. They target business users and cater to the needs of business.
How so? You assert this general idea several times, but the only thing you mention that you were able to do was to enable tethering when the carrier wouldn't allow it. That's a neat trick, but hardly something for businesses to get excited about. You basically have a clever hack that's unsupported by your vendor, when a lot of businesses would sooner pay for a supported solution.
I've heard lots of people tout Blackberry as "better for business", but frankly I don't see it. Mostly the only features I see businesses using are the ability to sync mail, calendars, and contacts while being able to force a remote-wipe if the phone gets lost. ActiveSync does all of those things just as well. The main difference is that BES adds another point of failure, and the whole thing of routing information through BES/RIM and sending service books is kind of a mess. As someone who supports several different businesses in different industries, I see far more trouble-calls for Blackberries than for iPhones, and users tend to be far happier about getting an iPhone. Morale isn't unimportant.
That's not entirely true. You could have a democracy that is very socialist. Also, people confuse "Capitalism" as an economic system with "Capitalism" as a moral system. The economic system does not encourage greed. It's about economic freedom without a government dictating how you should spend/invest your money. This freedom allows you to be greedy or generous. Then there's "Capitalism" as a moral system, which is a more recent invention by rich people to justify their privilege. It's a variation on the "might makes right" mentality, claiming that wealth and economic success is the measure of virtue, and therefore anything done in the pursuit of wealth can't be bad.
I've got any number of users who are asking me how well our company integrates business features with iPhones and Android phones, and I keep telling them "well, decently, but not as good as with blackberry"
I don't know... I suspect even some of Blackberry's business integration features are a matter of over-hype. These days, I'm seeing way more problems with Blackberries syncing with BES than with Androids/iPhones using ActiveSync. When there are problems, they're much harder to sort out. The whole BES setup has become an additional complex layer of unreliable mess to troubleshoot, and I'd rather not deal with it.
RIM is still putting out products of the style of Windows Mobile (pre-7) and Palm devices. The UI stinks, and the whole device had the feel of "phone with email and web browsing poorly crammed in" rather than "sleek mobile computing device that includes a phone." People make a big deal about the keyboards, but I think it's at least partially an issue about "what you're used to", because I can type faster and more comfortably on my iPhone than my Blackberry. Blackberry keys are too tiny, and I make too many typos.
As far as I can recall, the dominance of Blackberries in business was a result of being the first company to market with good support for Exchange servers that provided push email, address books, calendars, and an option to remote-wipe the device. Those features aren't impressive anymore, and RIM's implementation isn't even all that impressive..
I agree with this-- you need enough knowledge to judge the work of the people you're managing, but often enough, it's detrimental for managers to "pitch in".
I'm sure there are people here who would disagree. If you're the person being managed, sometimes it's nice to see your manager pitch in and help. They're suddenly doing "real work". And as a manager, sometimes it's helpful to experience first-hand the difficulties that your subordinates are facing. It gives you perspective, and it gives you a better grasp on how to help your subordinates.
On the other hand, one of the primary jobs of a manager is to be detached from some of the nitty-gritty details and to be keeping an eye on the big picture. It might be that while everyone else is obsessed with making their code perfect and efficient, your time is better spent looking at the product as a cohesive whole and figuring out whether you're actually achieving your goals. It's a challenging job in its own right, and it's a job too often neglected.
This sounds right to me. Maybe you don't even need to administer the site, but use a hosted solution instead. That way, you can really focus on content creation.
But part of it is also having realistic expectations. It's very likely that in 10 years, the web will be a different beast, and the view of what constitutes a "good website" will change too. As the web changes, the tools used to create it must also change. Whatever you come up with, don't expect that you'll be using the same tools in 20 years. In computer terms, 5 years kind of is the "long haul".
Instead of trying to keep your tools constant, try to keep your data portable. One of the advantages of something like Wordpress is that it's so popular that, when it gets superseded by other things, there will certainly be methods to translate Wordpress into those new forms-- and it's generally easier to pull information from a database in a sensible way than to pull it out of HTML.
So what I'm saying is, don't focus on making sure that you can use the same editor for the next 20 years, and instead focus on trying to make sure you can pull your old content into a new form every 5 years. That's how you future-proof.
Also, Google's thing is generally to come up with search algorithms to *automatically* give you something like what you're probably looking for. The sort of "Kid's section" for the internet would need a high level of judgement, and therefore would need to be curated. That's not really the sort of thing that Google does.
I don't think it's a horrible idea. In general, with all the excessive amount of information on the Internet, I'd love to see some higher quality curation to really point people in the direction of great things. But of course, it's not easy to do, and it's not easy to make these kinds of business models work on the Internet. People want everything to be free, which means you can't spend a lot of time or money on it. This is why the news media is falling apart. This is why the music industry and movie industry are in turmoil. Everyone wants the sort of quality that is expensive to produce, but they don't want to pay for the product.
That said, if I had kids, I'm sure I'd like having access to some kind of sandboxed Internet service where they could access Sesame Street and Disney stuff (and whatever else) without risk of stumbling across porn. I'd want them to spend more time outside, away from TV or computer screens, but hell, I know how nice it is to be able to sit a kid in front of a screen and know they'll be quiet and happy for a couple of hours.
True, but the problem is that we don't know what problems his office is having, or what "easy fixes" the OP might be missing. Also, given the nature of what this IT guy is asking, I wouldn't suggest anything much more complicated than setting up file/print sharing, and maybe an internal web server.
Rubbish. Obviously you're a developer, and not a real "IT guy". Let me go ahead and say the thing that you don't want to hear: general IT support is a different ball game, and you probably don't know how to do it properly.
Sometimes you don't know what you want to accomplish until you know what is possible.
Right, so if you're at that stage, then you probably shouldn't be mucking around in a production server. Set up a test system, screw around with different things, and when you're done and know exactly what you want to do, then determine if your current server offers a sensible way to do it. Either way, you're going to have to start by picking something you'd like to do, and researching what's needed to make it happen.
Your's is an engineer's answer. Innovators, on the other hand, tend to be driven more by the question "What can we do?" than by "What do we need?", as in Faraday's answer to "What use is electricity?": '"What use is a new-born baby?" The history of technology is full of examples where the major benefits were not even imagined before the technology became available.
Are we talking about potential innovation here? Is this guy looking to invent a new kind of server technology? Or is it some guy who'd be pleased with himself if he learned to set up a wiki on his local server?
Giving an engineer's answer can be helpful if you're talking to someone who's hoping to be an engineer.
While generally this is true, professionals tend to forget that at the very beginning plain ignorance (not stupidity... ignorance means one simply does not know) is the main problem. The question is "I don't know what I can accomplish or what I'm supposed to do. How do I know what's reasonable, what's too expensive, what might be accomplished?"
Well first, I'm explicitly speaking in generalities. But more importantly, I'm speaking from experience of being someone who started out knowing nothing, and now I'm a relatively high-level IT guy (Relatively! I'm not trying to brag, and yes, you might still know things I don't.)
In my experience, things geneally turn out better when you start by defining your goals. I'm not saying that this guy shouldn't experiment, but that he probably shouldn't just poke around on a production server, installing and uninstalling different things. If you don't really know what you're doing, decide on something that you'd like to do and think should be possible, and then start researching what's needed to do it. Experiment on a spare desktop machine. When you have it figured out, then you can think about installing it on the server.
It's generally better to start a project from "I want to accomplish [x], so what do I need?" rather than "I have [x], so what can I accomplish with it?" The first approach will be much more focused and more likely to succeed.
Second thing to keep in mind: you don't want to experiment on a production server. I don't care if the "production server" is only a backup server-- if you don't want to endanger your backups, then it's still a production server. This means you shouldn't do anything with this server until you've planned what you want to install on it, and you've already set up a test implementation and you know what you're doing.
Third thing to keep in mind: in current IT practices, it's often not worth it for a small company to do things for themselves unless they need to. You probably need a local file server and therefore also a backup scheme. Aside from that, things like web hosting, email, and chat are usually better handled by a big company that can afford a datacenter. If you do try to do email internally, make sure you back it up and have a plan for outages and disaster recovery.
All that aside, you could start with basic services: directory services, file sharing, email, etc. Filemaker has its uses, but let the use determine the tool. Don't go around pounding on everything just because you've found yourself a hammer. Define the job, and then pick the best tool for the job.
There are a couple of things here. First, it's much easier to enforce security policies when upper management is telling you in no uncertain terms that they want you to do that. It's not uncommon, though, for upper management to be telling you that they want all of their data to be 100% completely secure, but simultaneously telling you that preventing them from poking holes in your security is completely unacceptable. Upper management isn't always reasonable.
Now one of the problems with the attitude taken in the previous paragraph is obvious: poking holes in security is incompatible with being secure. Another problem is less obvious: there's no such thing as 100% secure. Good security is often defined by having each thing (each device or each piece of data) achieving an appropriate level of balance between security and accessibility. Some people don't really have secrets in their email, so there's no point in being paranoid. Often, the problem with protecting the secrets in email is the fact that secrets are in email to begin with-- as a general rule, email isn't that secure anyway.
Also, a lot of security measures are nearly as effective as they first seem. In recent years, I've heard a lot of different people make a *huge* deal about the ability to remotely wipe phones, as though it's a cure-all for these kinds of problems. However, it assumes that phones stay on the network long enough for the remote-wipe command to get through. However, I've had users whose phone have gotten stolen, and the phones never check in after they're stolen. Insofar as the thieves are out for data, they're smart enough to close off the data connection before the theft is even discovered and reported.
Big companies need simple and strict policies because they can afford to exercise judgement. Companies with high security needs are special cases. But for a lot of users at a lot of companies, best-effort security measures are generally good enough.
That's great that you work for a company that bothered to draft official policies on such things and then went on to follow those policies. Many of us have worked for companies without such a safety net, and telling the CEO "no" in a situation like this will mean trouble. It might not mean immediate firing or anything, but it will mean getting yelled at, overruled in your refusal, and then you will on the outs with management for the rest of your time at that job.
If you work for a hospital, that may be why. Hospitals generally have to deal with a fair amount of regulation, and so they're used to the concept that there are rules and you need to follow them. Many businesses don't really accept those kinds of ideas, and you'd better damned well do what the CEO says.
It's not a *simple* business decision. If you can actually calculate all the costs and benefits, then yes, it may be a simple decision, but that calculation isn't as easy as it seems.
Setting aside the possible loss of data, there's also the issue that the IT department loses control of the computing devices, which means that support is more difficult, which means that IT costs may go up. How much? It's hard to say. On the other hand, you may not need to purchase as much equipment if employees are providing their own, and you may see increased efficiency due to everyone working on a platform that they're comfortable with. On the other hand, you may see decreased efficiency due to everyone working on different platforms with god-knows-what modifications.
Depending on the nature of the business and there character of the culture, there may be a Darwinesque "survival of the fittest" benefit to allowing people to use their own gear. Instead of a top-down decision by IT or some business manager, you might have several different approaches at the same time, and the best, most efficient workflow may win out. Of course, this would be scary to a lot of managers and business owners, since it means ceding some control of their business to uncontrolled forces with unpredictable outcomes.
Aside from that, there are more ephemeral aspects to these kinds of problems. There are questions like, "What kind of work environment do I want?" and "What does it do to morale to force people to use Blackberries when they want to use iPhones?" or "Will being very strict prevent me from attracting the talent that will make my business successful?"
Of course, I'm sure you can find a pointy-haired MBA who will do all the calculations and tell you what the cost is, but it won't be accurate. Some journalist will write a story about the subject, saying what the "right answer" is, but it will be qualified by saying it's "according to expert" and only applies to "many situations", citing that there is also dissent on the issue. Some book author will write a whole complicated theory about it, it will become the fad management theory of pointy-haired-bosses everywhere, and then it will be discarded 3 years later.
Keep it simple, and don't make your organization any more complicated than it needs to be.
I'm a little paranoid, so my method is probably more complicated than it needs to be, but it's still pretty simple. If it's paperwork that I don't foresee actually needing ever again, I shred it. If I think there's any chance I might need it, I throw it into a manilla folder and put it into a filing cabinet. The organization is pretty free-form, just thorough enough that I know I can find a document if I need to.
If a document is important, I also scan it and put it into an encrypted disk image that uses the same folder names as my paper file. I then back up this encrypted image online.
Doesn't run on anything less than OSX Leopard. Make no bones about it; an OSX point update is really a major OS version update akin to Vista or 7, but all hiding within the OSX moniker.
Yeah-- it is worth noting, though, that one of the reasons Apple has not pushed into the enterprise world is that they often fail to offer long-term support for anything. Apple has as much as said (and maybe even explicitly said, at some point) that they consider the iPhone's lifecycle to be 2 years, and once a model is 3 years old, it may not be supported by iOS updates. Apple also tends to be relatively quick to drop software features and push ahead with new hardware more quickly than others are willing to. Dell may sometimes have the newest Intel processor earlier than Apple does, but most Dell computers still come with VGA ports.
So I think the real question isn't just about whether Apple or Windows are offering support for a long enough period, but it's also about what we perceive their motives to be. In each case, is it that the developer is covertly trying to push people toward buying new products, or is it that they're trying to push technology ahead and don't want to invest in legacy support?
he told [Google CEO Eric] Schmidt that some day his tombstone will read, "I killed newspapers."
That assumes that when Schmidt dies, people still know and care what the newspaper was. Of course, if they really care, then it will probably mean that the newspaper isn't dead.
And the unfortunate truth is that making jobs obsolete is part of what makes the economy grow. We were (collectively, as a people) spending however many millions of dollars on distributing books around, and now we're spending a fraction of that. This saves us millions of dollars which can then theoretically be spent on something more productive than an obsolete business model.
If there is a problem, it's not that jobs are being made obsolete by more efficient business models, but rather that the savings are being spent on hookers and blow for CEOs and bankers instead of being spent on infrastructure and innovation.
Slashdot Mirror
Basically, you need a router with 2 WAN ports and the ability to configure failover. I don't have a good recommendation, because it's a feature that generally isn't available in consumer-grade gear. Expect to spend a couple hundred dollars.
And that's just for failover. Load balancing is more complicated and often doesn't work out as well as people hope.
I'm not too angry because I see this as a move to increase the percentage of their income coming from streaming. That's the only way I see this as making sense to me: Netflix is hoping that, in a few years, they'll be a streaming-only service. that means that they'll need to make streaming more expensive (so they can pay more licensing fees to content-owners in order to increase their streaming library) and also dissuade people from receiving DVD purchases.
It's hard to determine what it means to "pay their share". If the top 5% of the income earners are paying 60% of the taxes, it makes me wonder whether they're holding on to 60% of the disposable income.
Yeah, but I would at least wonder about the methodology. Did they pick the most remote houses, difficult to lay infrastructure to, and then figure out what it would cost to lay a 100Mbps fiber line from the nearest facility? Or did they actually analyze the expenditures that have happened and determined what was actually spent? Even if there was $349,234 spent per household in some instance, is that representative of what was spent throughout the project, or is that an outlier?
It also might not be entirely fair to analyze these things based on the average income and house price. There might be other conditions, like running an Internet backbone to a particular town might enable that town to grow and become more prosperous. It might make it cheaper to run broadband to surrounding areas in the future.
RIM and Blackberry are about business. They target business users and cater to the needs of business.
How so? You assert this general idea several times, but the only thing you mention that you were able to do was to enable tethering when the carrier wouldn't allow it. That's a neat trick, but hardly something for businesses to get excited about. You basically have a clever hack that's unsupported by your vendor, when a lot of businesses would sooner pay for a supported solution.
I've heard lots of people tout Blackberry as "better for business", but frankly I don't see it. Mostly the only features I see businesses using are the ability to sync mail, calendars, and contacts while being able to force a remote-wipe if the phone gets lost. ActiveSync does all of those things just as well. The main difference is that BES adds another point of failure, and the whole thing of routing information through BES/RIM and sending service books is kind of a mess. As someone who supports several different businesses in different industries, I see far more trouble-calls for Blackberries than for iPhones, and users tend to be far happier about getting an iPhone. Morale isn't unimportant.
I have an Android device and a BlackBerry and I can still respond to email/text messages faster on the BlackBerry.
I have an iPhone and a Blackberry, and I can type much faster on the iPhone. So what?
That's not entirely true. You could have a democracy that is very socialist. Also, people confuse "Capitalism" as an economic system with "Capitalism" as a moral system. The economic system does not encourage greed. It's about economic freedom without a government dictating how you should spend/invest your money. This freedom allows you to be greedy or generous. Then there's "Capitalism" as a moral system, which is a more recent invention by rich people to justify their privilege. It's a variation on the "might makes right" mentality, claiming that wealth and economic success is the measure of virtue, and therefore anything done in the pursuit of wealth can't be bad.
I've got any number of users who are asking me how well our company integrates business features with iPhones and Android phones, and I keep telling them "well, decently, but not as good as with blackberry"
I don't know... I suspect even some of Blackberry's business integration features are a matter of over-hype. These days, I'm seeing way more problems with Blackberries syncing with BES than with Androids/iPhones using ActiveSync. When there are problems, they're much harder to sort out. The whole BES setup has become an additional complex layer of unreliable mess to troubleshoot, and I'd rather not deal with it.
RIM is still putting out products of the style of Windows Mobile (pre-7) and Palm devices. The UI stinks, and the whole device had the feel of "phone with email and web browsing poorly crammed in" rather than "sleek mobile computing device that includes a phone." People make a big deal about the keyboards, but I think it's at least partially an issue about "what you're used to", because I can type faster and more comfortably on my iPhone than my Blackberry. Blackberry keys are too tiny, and I make too many typos.
As far as I can recall, the dominance of Blackberries in business was a result of being the first company to market with good support for Exchange servers that provided push email, address books, calendars, and an option to remote-wipe the device. Those features aren't impressive anymore, and RIM's implementation isn't even all that impressive..
I agree with this-- you need enough knowledge to judge the work of the people you're managing, but often enough, it's detrimental for managers to "pitch in".
I'm sure there are people here who would disagree. If you're the person being managed, sometimes it's nice to see your manager pitch in and help. They're suddenly doing "real work". And as a manager, sometimes it's helpful to experience first-hand the difficulties that your subordinates are facing. It gives you perspective, and it gives you a better grasp on how to help your subordinates.
On the other hand, one of the primary jobs of a manager is to be detached from some of the nitty-gritty details and to be keeping an eye on the big picture. It might be that while everyone else is obsessed with making their code perfect and efficient, your time is better spent looking at the product as a cohesive whole and figuring out whether you're actually achieving your goals. It's a challenging job in its own right, and it's a job too often neglected.
This sounds right to me. Maybe you don't even need to administer the site, but use a hosted solution instead. That way, you can really focus on content creation.
But part of it is also having realistic expectations. It's very likely that in 10 years, the web will be a different beast, and the view of what constitutes a "good website" will change too. As the web changes, the tools used to create it must also change. Whatever you come up with, don't expect that you'll be using the same tools in 20 years. In computer terms, 5 years kind of is the "long haul".
Instead of trying to keep your tools constant, try to keep your data portable. One of the advantages of something like Wordpress is that it's so popular that, when it gets superseded by other things, there will certainly be methods to translate Wordpress into those new forms-- and it's generally easier to pull information from a database in a sensible way than to pull it out of HTML.
So what I'm saying is, don't focus on making sure that you can use the same editor for the next 20 years, and instead focus on trying to make sure you can pull your old content into a new form every 5 years. That's how you future-proof.
Also, Google's thing is generally to come up with search algorithms to *automatically* give you something like what you're probably looking for. The sort of "Kid's section" for the internet would need a high level of judgement, and therefore would need to be curated. That's not really the sort of thing that Google does.
I don't think it's a horrible idea. In general, with all the excessive amount of information on the Internet, I'd love to see some higher quality curation to really point people in the direction of great things. But of course, it's not easy to do, and it's not easy to make these kinds of business models work on the Internet. People want everything to be free, which means you can't spend a lot of time or money on it. This is why the news media is falling apart. This is why the music industry and movie industry are in turmoil. Everyone wants the sort of quality that is expensive to produce, but they don't want to pay for the product.
That said, if I had kids, I'm sure I'd like having access to some kind of sandboxed Internet service where they could access Sesame Street and Disney stuff (and whatever else) without risk of stumbling across porn. I'd want them to spend more time outside, away from TV or computer screens, but hell, I know how nice it is to be able to sit a kid in front of a screen and know they'll be quiet and happy for a couple of hours.
True, but the problem is that we don't know what problems his office is having, or what "easy fixes" the OP might be missing. Also, given the nature of what this IT guy is asking, I wouldn't suggest anything much more complicated than setting up file/print sharing, and maybe an internal web server.
Rubbish. That is waterfall methodology all over.
Rubbish. Obviously you're a developer, and not a real "IT guy". Let me go ahead and say the thing that you don't want to hear: general IT support is a different ball game, and you probably don't know how to do it properly.
Sometimes you don't know what you want to accomplish until you know what is possible.
Right, so if you're at that stage, then you probably shouldn't be mucking around in a production server. Set up a test system, screw around with different things, and when you're done and know exactly what you want to do, then determine if your current server offers a sensible way to do it. Either way, you're going to have to start by picking something you'd like to do, and researching what's needed to make it happen.
Your's is an engineer's answer. Innovators, on the other hand, tend to be driven more by the question "What can we do?" than by "What do we need?", as in Faraday's answer to "What use is electricity?": '"What use is a new-born baby?" The history of technology is full of examples where the major benefits were not even imagined before the technology became available.
Are we talking about potential innovation here? Is this guy looking to invent a new kind of server technology? Or is it some guy who'd be pleased with himself if he learned to set up a wiki on his local server?
Giving an engineer's answer can be helpful if you're talking to someone who's hoping to be an engineer.
While generally this is true, professionals tend to forget that at the very beginning plain ignorance (not stupidity... ignorance means one simply does not know) is the main problem. The question is "I don't know what I can accomplish or what I'm supposed to do. How do I know what's reasonable, what's too expensive, what might be accomplished?"
Well first, I'm explicitly speaking in generalities. But more importantly, I'm speaking from experience of being someone who started out knowing nothing, and now I'm a relatively high-level IT guy (Relatively! I'm not trying to brag, and yes, you might still know things I don't.)
In my experience, things geneally turn out better when you start by defining your goals. I'm not saying that this guy shouldn't experiment, but that he probably shouldn't just poke around on a production server, installing and uninstalling different things. If you don't really know what you're doing, decide on something that you'd like to do and think should be possible, and then start researching what's needed to do it. Experiment on a spare desktop machine. When you have it figured out, then you can think about installing it on the server.
It's generally better to start a project from "I want to accomplish [x], so what do I need?" rather than "I have [x], so what can I accomplish with it?" The first approach will be much more focused and more likely to succeed.
Second thing to keep in mind: you don't want to experiment on a production server. I don't care if the "production server" is only a backup server-- if you don't want to endanger your backups, then it's still a production server. This means you shouldn't do anything with this server until you've planned what you want to install on it, and you've already set up a test implementation and you know what you're doing.
Third thing to keep in mind: in current IT practices, it's often not worth it for a small company to do things for themselves unless they need to. You probably need a local file server and therefore also a backup scheme. Aside from that, things like web hosting, email, and chat are usually better handled by a big company that can afford a datacenter. If you do try to do email internally, make sure you back it up and have a plan for outages and disaster recovery.
All that aside, you could start with basic services: directory services, file sharing, email, etc. Filemaker has its uses, but let the use determine the tool. Don't go around pounding on everything just because you've found yourself a hammer. Define the job, and then pick the best tool for the job.
There are a couple of things here. First, it's much easier to enforce security policies when upper management is telling you in no uncertain terms that they want you to do that. It's not uncommon, though, for upper management to be telling you that they want all of their data to be 100% completely secure, but simultaneously telling you that preventing them from poking holes in your security is completely unacceptable. Upper management isn't always reasonable.
Now one of the problems with the attitude taken in the previous paragraph is obvious: poking holes in security is incompatible with being secure. Another problem is less obvious: there's no such thing as 100% secure. Good security is often defined by having each thing (each device or each piece of data) achieving an appropriate level of balance between security and accessibility. Some people don't really have secrets in their email, so there's no point in being paranoid. Often, the problem with protecting the secrets in email is the fact that secrets are in email to begin with-- as a general rule, email isn't that secure anyway.
Also, a lot of security measures are nearly as effective as they first seem. In recent years, I've heard a lot of different people make a *huge* deal about the ability to remotely wipe phones, as though it's a cure-all for these kinds of problems. However, it assumes that phones stay on the network long enough for the remote-wipe command to get through. However, I've had users whose phone have gotten stolen, and the phones never check in after they're stolen. Insofar as the thieves are out for data, they're smart enough to close off the data connection before the theft is even discovered and reported.
Big companies need simple and strict policies because they can afford to exercise judgement. Companies with high security needs are special cases. But for a lot of users at a lot of companies, best-effort security measures are generally good enough.
That's great that you work for a company that bothered to draft official policies on such things and then went on to follow those policies. Many of us have worked for companies without such a safety net, and telling the CEO "no" in a situation like this will mean trouble. It might not mean immediate firing or anything, but it will mean getting yelled at, overruled in your refusal, and then you will on the outs with management for the rest of your time at that job.
If you work for a hospital, that may be why. Hospitals generally have to deal with a fair amount of regulation, and so they're used to the concept that there are rules and you need to follow them. Many businesses don't really accept those kinds of ideas, and you'd better damned well do what the CEO says.
It's not a *simple* business decision. If you can actually calculate all the costs and benefits, then yes, it may be a simple decision, but that calculation isn't as easy as it seems.
Setting aside the possible loss of data, there's also the issue that the IT department loses control of the computing devices, which means that support is more difficult, which means that IT costs may go up. How much? It's hard to say. On the other hand, you may not need to purchase as much equipment if employees are providing their own, and you may see increased efficiency due to everyone working on a platform that they're comfortable with. On the other hand, you may see decreased efficiency due to everyone working on different platforms with god-knows-what modifications.
Depending on the nature of the business and there character of the culture, there may be a Darwinesque "survival of the fittest" benefit to allowing people to use their own gear. Instead of a top-down decision by IT or some business manager, you might have several different approaches at the same time, and the best, most efficient workflow may win out. Of course, this would be scary to a lot of managers and business owners, since it means ceding some control of their business to uncontrolled forces with unpredictable outcomes.
Aside from that, there are more ephemeral aspects to these kinds of problems. There are questions like, "What kind of work environment do I want?" and "What does it do to morale to force people to use Blackberries when they want to use iPhones?" or "Will being very strict prevent me from attracting the talent that will make my business successful?"
Of course, I'm sure you can find a pointy-haired MBA who will do all the calculations and tell you what the cost is, but it won't be accurate. Some journalist will write a story about the subject, saying what the "right answer" is, but it will be qualified by saying it's "according to expert" and only applies to "many situations", citing that there is also dissent on the issue. Some book author will write a whole complicated theory about it, it will become the fad management theory of pointy-haired-bosses everywhere, and then it will be discarded 3 years later.
Keep it simple, and don't make your organization any more complicated than it needs to be.
I'm a little paranoid, so my method is probably more complicated than it needs to be, but it's still pretty simple. If it's paperwork that I don't foresee actually needing ever again, I shred it. If I think there's any chance I might need it, I throw it into a manilla folder and put it into a filing cabinet. The organization is pretty free-form, just thorough enough that I know I can find a document if I need to.
If a document is important, I also scan it and put it into an encrypted disk image that uses the same folder names as my paper file. I then back up this encrypted image online.
I'm pretty sure that printing out your electronic copy won't really work, because you could have easily modified it while it was stored there.
Right, because paper is a magical medium that disallows document forgery.
And if you're one of the poor unfortunate souls who use Hulu Plus, you're SOL.
Doesn't run on anything less than OSX Leopard. Make no bones about it; an OSX point update is really a major OS version update akin to Vista or 7, but all hiding within the OSX moniker.
Yeah-- it is worth noting, though, that one of the reasons Apple has not pushed into the enterprise world is that they often fail to offer long-term support for anything. Apple has as much as said (and maybe even explicitly said, at some point) that they consider the iPhone's lifecycle to be 2 years, and once a model is 3 years old, it may not be supported by iOS updates. Apple also tends to be relatively quick to drop software features and push ahead with new hardware more quickly than others are willing to. Dell may sometimes have the newest Intel processor earlier than Apple does, but most Dell computers still come with VGA ports.
So I think the real question isn't just about whether Apple or Windows are offering support for a long enough period, but it's also about what we perceive their motives to be. In each case, is it that the developer is covertly trying to push people toward buying new products, or is it that they're trying to push technology ahead and don't want to invest in legacy support?
he told [Google CEO Eric] Schmidt that some day his tombstone will read, "I killed newspapers."
That assumes that when Schmidt dies, people still know and care what the newspaper was. Of course, if they really care, then it will probably mean that the newspaper isn't dead.
And the unfortunate truth is that making jobs obsolete is part of what makes the economy grow. We were (collectively, as a people) spending however many millions of dollars on distributing books around, and now we're spending a fraction of that. This saves us millions of dollars which can then theoretically be spent on something more productive than an obsolete business model.
If there is a problem, it's not that jobs are being made obsolete by more efficient business models, but rather that the savings are being spent on hookers and blow for CEOs and bankers instead of being spent on infrastructure and innovation.