No idea how you managed to get a -1 for that.. It's the reason I didn't move to the US long ago (the balance between the worker and employer is screwed, and it's only become worse as time has progressed).. It does seem as though some corporates really are trying to set up an environment that is very close to indentured servitude. Natural citizens still have legal privileges that trump the desires of the corporates for cheap labour, so they want to import. That, really, is a crappy way to do business. It'll work in a short term, but ends up as a race to the bottom, and probable collapse far earlier than necessary (wasting a lot of long term productivity and profit).
A realist will examine it properly, and notice that there's a small gap (and thus take that, as it's more efficient). If the gap isn't there, they'll look for a way round.. In your analogy, the people who are the "positive" adjusted ones will quite possibly spend the time until they starve to death or die of thirst looking for that small gap "that must be there, just near here", while the realist acknowledges that there's something insurmountable, so routes round it.
Winning would be getting in, achieving the objective and getting out without making an international incident out of it, or giving the opponent a chance to stir things up and look strong (they didn't capture a leader, just a soldier who was glad to die for the cause, and will now be in 'heaven' with his fourty virgins, or whatever is promised).. The eyes of the world suddenly look America's way (hot on the heels of the international disbelief that the USA can be held to ransom internally by a hard line faction within its own government, almost shutting it down totally). The US is currently looking VERY incompetent on the international stage. This is bad for diplomacy, and the negotiating stance (and possible alliances). The losses for the US in this are actually pretty staggering if you take into account that their "successful" mission cost the country far more than they could ever hope to gain (a pyhrric victory), and the "failed" mission just makes them seem inept and ineffective.. The world's most highly funded military pushed back by a few guys who are portrayed almost as frothing at the mouth backwards sheep-herders with cheap guns and no real military knowledge and funding that doesn't amount to a drop in the ocean compared to what's been spent on gearing up the US squad. It's pretty damning really. And no, I don't hold the military guys in lesser regard because of this.. I put it squarely in the hands of the politicians who thought it would be a good idea. You know, the same kind of people who are currently so patriotic about their country, they're willing to see if crash and burn because they're not getting their own way. Maybe that's not the real truth, but that's pretty much the international perceived view.. And that's not something any country wants..
Interesting.. You mention that SWAT raids increase, and more people incarcerated tallies up with fewer gun crimes being committed. That seems to imply that if you lock up (or shoot in a SWAT raid) the group that are prone to committing gun crime, they don't get to commit it. So the system seems to work as intended; the law abiding non-psychotic population are protected.
Payroll, cleaners, administrative staff that send letters, most of the techies that keep things running, internal post, park wardens, public garbage colleciton.. You know, everything that isn't directly front line on keeping the basic lights on (but just don't ask for anything because there isn't the resource).
No, they had lots of people that said the system was unusable.. There were priorities of error, and a priority 1 was a showstopper. The places that consistently tested showed that the system for the first several years (already way past expected implementation date) for the Care Records part was seriously broken, and not fit for live use (bear in mind, this system isn't just supposed to be able to hold your office files, and it's fine if it's down for half an hour now and then, and perhaps lose a few things along the way with only a grumble; it holds your medical records.. The things that make the difference between life and death in some cases).
With things not working out on either side (again, for the Care Records parts; some parts, like PACS [Picture Archival and Communication System;the digitisation of your X-Rays instead of using film] work fine and are in almost universal use now, vastly changing the nature of care in the NHS. The big problems with it were:
A) Tony Blair not having a clue what was wanted, but saying it should be done in a year.
B) Setting a guy in charge of it that failed his computing degree.. One Richard Granger. It was pretty much his ideas that doomed the Care Records part of it, and allowed out a spec that was more a back of a cigarette packet sketch than a real spec.
C) Failing to have a real spec. Now the companies all bid for a very nebulous thing that said "You give us a lovely system that does what we want, and we'll give you billions.". Of course, they produced what they thought the NHS wanted, but the NHS discovered that it wasn't what they wanted. You know, basic Spec documentation you cover on computing. Which Granger failed.
D) There was also fault with the companies who leaped at the cash without a real spec.. They should have known that the contract was WAY too wooly and actually tied it down to real deliverables.
At renegotiation time, some of the vendors (like Fujitsu) worked out the cost of really doing what the NHS asked for (which was all the project management of the first round, plus a semi accurate spec). Which was a truly staggering figure. More than the NHS could stomach. The two are still in a legal scrap. Some vendors still kept the lights on in the data centres, and hosted what was there, but those installations are likely going to have to move out of those data centres by about 2015, as they're too expensive to maintain for the few installs.. And none of the vendors want to renew the system contract.
So, the price tag covers all the allocation (it was scaled to host EVERY NHS hospital in the UK, which is most of them), training, consultancy, migration of data (a high precision activity that needs zero data loss on a vast amount of very complex information, coming out of a vast quantity of different databases, and being shoehorned into one uniform schema. Doing this while still providing clinical care (you don't get to shut a hospital down for ripping out the heart of its data systems and replacing them with a new; it's all done while still treating patients and making sure nothing gets mis-recorded).. Training of a huge number of clinical staff (doctors, nurses, and anyone else who needs to use the system inside the NHS), the feeds.. Interfaces between that system and the various disparate ones that it needs to communicate with inside a hospital..
When you look at it, it's a breathtaking proposal, just nobody on high seemed to recognise that, and expected fast results because they said so and waved a fat wallet around. Unsurprisingly it went awry. The current UK government looked at the figures, the legal position and the chances of getting it sorted from a more businesslike side, and canned the bits that wouldn't work (the care records area).
As for the data protection side, that was one of the most heavily guarded I've seen anywhere.. It was pretty robust. The few 'leaks' that happened (people looking at records they shouldn't) were spotted by access audit, and people lost the jobs.. That simple, that strict.
Actual phychological and physical harm (bullying) is ok.. But god forbid you make a drawing of a video to sate your frustrations (or map a photo onto a game avatar, you know, like we used to put pictures on a dartboard).. That's illegal, terroristy and you need to be locked up for that!
Step 1) Someone is found to be bullying, punish them. Step 2) See a lot of this kind of behaviour vanish.
When you have no presence in a market, and most of your customers are about to enter an upgrade cycle to "your new product", sure, the growth rate is high. There again, iOS and Android have a huge market, close to saturated, yet still growing. This is akin to saying "my herb garden expanding at a faster rate than a continent filled with forest".
Teenagers are neurologically wired to take risks. It's part of the development of brains; many go on to do circus tricks far more dangerous (hell, American Football is as dangerous; there's zero legitimate reason to run full pelt into another guy who's also running full pelt at you, just to grab a ball.. Yet it's an American national sport that everyone applauds!). This guy was involved in a scene that often leads to interest in aeronautics and engineering, certainly a more technical side than most, so I don't think he was as 'stupid' as many here seem to think.. He made one mistake, and it was a fatal one.. That's a sad thing.. Sportsmen who push the edge always expose themselves to risk, but they're also the ones that if they survive, everyone applauds the most.
Getting resource to the moon is expensive (fighting against a heavy gravity well). Getting stuff back to earth is pretty cheap. Once you have the operation set up, it's pretty cheap.
Yes you can. "Pirating" something on the personal scale would be to take a copy of the program for your use without permission. Taking the source to sell elsewhere is commercial piracy, which is rightfully pilloried everywhere (I don't think I've seen many, if any, posts here defending commercial pirates; most of the replies I've read have flat out called for a lynch mob. They're in the same social category as spammers).
What you're effectively saying in your post is "You can't commit theft while with the same breath defend copyright infringement". Which, being completely separate things, you can do without the slightest hint of hypocrisy.
It's all part of the Eternal September playing a rush to the bottom. Trolls have discovered there's very little (if any) consequence to them being as obnoxious as possible, and many have come to realise that if you troll and upset people, they can't let it go as well as a well reasoned argument. Thus, it seems that if you Troll, you get a response, so more people troll, and the more abusive you are, the more attention is paid (and god forbid, someone deletes the abusive post, as that then ends up noted on all the tech blogs that the developer is censoring).
While things are stacked towards letting trolling pay off, I don't think anything's going to change..
I run an Android tablet, Linux laptop, iPhone and Win7 desktop. Each of them is fine for what I need them to do (they were individually chosen for a particular task).. The Android tab isn't a Nexus.. It's one of the cheap, but surprisingly good imports (a Rapid5 v2 from a company called A1CS) with a nice flash expansion from a micro SD, USB connector and HDMI out.. Gives me a nice 32GB flash expansion right there, quad core CPU, ability to watch movies (with good quality video and perfectly acceptable audio, though like all these devices, best done using headphones). I have my dive log on it, some movies, some books through the kindle app for when I'm not toting my kindle (Which I prefer for reading, but can use the tab at a push).. Notepads to write things with.. Tools to play around with photographs.. Pretty much all the things I need to keep myself occupied without having a network available that I need.. As soon as I get a net connection, then there's always the social nets, the web, email etc.. To date, I'm happy with my little Android tab.. The fact that it cost me under £100 means I can take it to dive sites and use the log, without worrying too much if it gets broken (which it hasn't done to date, nor has its predecessor).
Bill Gates made his money from screwing people over and devastating an industry. This saw his personal wealth become huge. Now, he puts bits of the personal wealth into altruistic things. That's how it used to work (where the industry barons used to sponsor altruistic actions, before the State really got into it). What he's doing is calling Google as a company out on not doing something that Microsoft is also not doing. If the Google founders end up with the personal wealth he's accumulated, then sure, call them out individually for not doing their bit. If they don't make the billions Gates has done, then perhaps their contributions will also be lesser. Compare like for like; it's great to do altruistic deeds.. But don't use those as a bludgeoning stick to boost your own ego and agendas...
But some learned wondrous things. And used that to go even deeper. Isn't that what education and learning is all about? If it appeals to enough groups to stay in print, that's a fair number.;
And everyone magically uses the custom apps which they just happen to have ported to their mobile phones? Or have you got UPS and things in place to tether your desktops to the mobiles or USB dongles? You're still at the mercy of battery, and you still have an outage. With servers in racks, and UPS, you can keep your core network/servers up for a while, and selectively reduce service at that end. If it comes to having to relocate, your working resource is going to be thoroughly disrupted whatever you're up to. It's expensive to move a company ad-hoc.
Bear in mind that most NHS places barely fund an IT department, let alone one that'll support the costs of encryption to every disk on every machine in a trust. General policy is usually that you don't save patient identifiable information to a non-server disk. And when you hire a contractor to do a job, you expect it to be done. The fault here isn't with the NHS, it's with a contractor who's supposed to be vetted as secure, offering a service, and then doing something completely stupid. Would be great if every machine everywhere was 100% secure, but alas, there's not the money or time available in most places.
You really obviously have no idea. I've done both, and I've seen people swing the lead at both levels. A real IT manager isn't an easy job, but being the one whose plans (the real IT tech) make or break the infrastructure really isn't trivial.
Hey, guess what.. I've been using computers since the days of the Commodore Pet. I was using and supporting microsoft since the days of MSDOS 3... And I was using UNIX before that. The bones I've had to pick with MS were originally because they had pretty shoddy tools, compared to the UNIX (for DOS), and no multi-tasking. Through the Windows 3 era, I thought it compared poorly to the Apple UI, and it performed absolutely shoddily when compared to OS/2.. I saw MS's marketing engine fire up, and scare people (needlessly) into just using their product, not by dint of superiority, just because they had cash to throw around. Dirty tricks really were the name of the game. With the advent of Win95, Microsoft actually had a GUI which I had to admit was well thought out. It did what was wanted in a simple and no fuss way. Sure, it was still a layer above DOS, but it was definitely usable, and actually comfortable.. They'd done their homework on that.. Fast forward to now. They force a UI that's pretty decent for a tablet (quite like how it handles on a tablet) onto a desktop.. And I hate it on the desktop.. The idea of using it for Servers is filling me with dread.. The ergonomics of it are atrocious in that use case; I'm just glad you can do everything in Powershell.. That really is going to be the start of a move to 'Core' install, and just run things via powershell. It's mostly how I do it these days, but I do enjoy the flexibility of the Win7 GUI (I think Win7 is the best OS MS have put out to date). I like the tech improvements behind the scenes in Win8, but after using it, I refuse to install it on my home workstation, and work is never going to move to that version (apart from tablets/kiosks, where it shines). In an attempt to grab the niche market, they seem to be eviscerating their core one.. Which I really just don't understand.. The strategy that would work would be to have an API that works across all the forms (tablet, kiosk, desktop) with a GUI that you can swap between depending on your needs.. If Android releases get the desktop done nicely (and optimised for desktops, not tablets), then MS could be in with a bigger fight than it expects..
In short, it's a good OS ruined by changes that alienate most people. Not just because they "have to learn something new" (which was their big thing about not shifting to Linux), but because it makes changes with no advantage, and quite frequently to their detriment.
The complexity often sets the ceiling. SQL Server is pretty simple out of the box, and with a reasonable toolset to let you administer it. I trust it to a level. However, cost 'savings' being what they are, a lot of companies who do not understand exactly what it is they're asking, will hire someone who can click the SQL Server buttons on the GUI and change a tape. They're cheaper than an in depth DBA that groks the environment by a long shot. However, when it comes emergency time, I really don't trust that things will go smoothly.
Oracle has the starting point that you need to know a few of the bits under the hood, so you actually start to understand what's really going on (it tries not to hide the messy details from you), seems to come with the kitchen sink (though occasionally with a fair mortgage as well), and requires staff that actually know what they're about; it actively encourages you to go deeper all the time.
I don't have a problem with a product that's geared for high end enterprise requiring a guru level knowledge to actually get going. At that level, you really should have the skills to back your actions up with.
So, who in the company was the "head of information security"? This is a role that not many think to introduce, and without it, sysadmins who excel in some areas may miss some of the hardening aspects. Hell, if you've got a 'regular' sysadmin who just installs database engines on boxes as well, you don't even have a DBA. That's two corporate strikes on good business practice (the problem goes deeper than the sysadmin; if there was only one full stop, then I'm wondering just how much he was running round trying to deal with the wave of stuff that hit him).
Of course it wasn't fair that you'd tricked the sysadmin; he was right in that. However, the world in general isn't fair, so you were right in that. You did something that would have taken quite a lot of effort from someone outside the company (but does happen). That being said, the general method of getting specific info is to rock up on site dressed as one of the IT techs and simply go to a user and mention that you're there to do some work for them (replacing their PC with a shiner one is often a strong tactic). Now, if they just leave themselves logged in while you transfer their apps and files to the new one.. Once you have a valid account, the rest is pretty fast. Social engineering attacks are a royal pain, because they rely on the trust that exists to get the job done with any decent pace. The upshot of this, I'd guess, is to get the server reconfigured, and also put policy in place to make sure that all calls for security requests are vetted more thoroughly. This means that what could be done on the phone (which a lot of complaints in this thread want) now has to be ticketed, vetted, and take several hours or days (incidentally, I think that more secure way is the real way to do it), which will have many people up in arms because they want something done NOW. Safe and now are rarely compatible.
Incidentally, there's a very good reason that external security auditors use a lot of diplomacy and objectivity; it's a very tough thing to have all your work dragged through the coals with nothing hidden and everything brought to light. But it is necessary.
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No idea how you managed to get a -1 for that.. It's the reason I didn't move to the US long ago (the balance between the worker and employer is screwed, and it's only become worse as time has progressed).. It does seem as though some corporates really are trying to set up an environment that is very close to indentured servitude. Natural citizens still have legal privileges that trump the desires of the corporates for cheap labour, so they want to import.
That, really, is a crappy way to do business. It'll work in a short term, but ends up as a race to the bottom, and probable collapse far earlier than necessary (wasting a lot of long term productivity and profit).
You've not been there, have you?
You mean, like Japan did, then completely rolled all over US industry once it had the production base?
A realist will examine it properly, and notice that there's a small gap (and thus take that, as it's more efficient). If the gap isn't there, they'll look for a way round..
In your analogy, the people who are the "positive" adjusted ones will quite possibly spend the time until they starve to death or die of thirst looking for that small gap "that must be there, just near here", while the realist acknowledges that there's something insurmountable, so routes round it.
Winning would be getting in, achieving the objective and getting out without making an international incident out of it, or giving the opponent a chance to stir things up and look strong (they didn't capture a leader, just a soldier who was glad to die for the cause, and will now be in 'heaven' with his fourty virgins, or whatever is promised).. The eyes of the world suddenly look America's way (hot on the heels of the international disbelief that the USA can be held to ransom internally by a hard line faction within its own government, almost shutting it down totally). The US is currently looking VERY incompetent on the international stage. This is bad for diplomacy, and the negotiating stance (and possible alliances).
The losses for the US in this are actually pretty staggering if you take into account that their "successful" mission cost the country far more than they could ever hope to gain (a pyhrric victory), and the "failed" mission just makes them seem inept and ineffective.. The world's most highly funded military pushed back by a few guys who are portrayed almost as frothing at the mouth backwards sheep-herders with cheap guns and no real military knowledge and funding that doesn't amount to a drop in the ocean compared to what's been spent on gearing up the US squad.
It's pretty damning really.
And no, I don't hold the military guys in lesser regard because of this.. I put it squarely in the hands of the politicians who thought it would be a good idea. You know, the same kind of people who are currently so patriotic about their country, they're willing to see if crash and burn because they're not getting their own way.
Maybe that's not the real truth, but that's pretty much the international perceived view.. And that's not something any country wants..
Interesting.. You mention that SWAT raids increase, and more people incarcerated tallies up with fewer gun crimes being committed.
That seems to imply that if you lock up (or shoot in a SWAT raid) the group that are prone to committing gun crime, they don't get to commit it. So the system seems to work as intended; the law abiding non-psychotic population are protected.
What's your beef with that?
Payroll, cleaners, administrative staff that send letters, most of the techies that keep things running, internal post, park wardens, public garbage colleciton.. You know, everything that isn't directly front line on keeping the basic lights on (but just don't ask for anything because there isn't the resource).
No, they had lots of people that said the system was unusable.. There were priorities of error, and a priority 1 was a showstopper.
The places that consistently tested showed that the system for the first several years (already way past expected implementation date) for the Care Records part was seriously broken, and not fit for live use (bear in mind, this system isn't just supposed to be able to hold your office files, and it's fine if it's down for half an hour now and then, and perhaps lose a few things along the way with only a grumble; it holds your medical records.. The things that make the difference between life and death in some cases).
With things not working out on either side (again, for the Care Records parts; some parts, like PACS [Picture Archival and Communication System;the digitisation of your X-Rays instead of using film] work fine and are in almost universal use now, vastly changing the nature of care in the NHS.
The big problems with it were:
A) Tony Blair not having a clue what was wanted, but saying it should be done in a year.
B) Setting a guy in charge of it that failed his computing degree.. One Richard Granger. It was pretty much his ideas that doomed the Care Records part of it, and allowed out a spec that was more a back of a cigarette packet sketch than a real spec.
C) Failing to have a real spec. Now the companies all bid for a very nebulous thing that said "You give us a lovely system that does what we want, and we'll give you billions.". Of course, they produced what they thought the NHS wanted, but the NHS discovered that it wasn't what they wanted. You know, basic Spec documentation you cover on computing. Which Granger failed.
D) There was also fault with the companies who leaped at the cash without a real spec.. They should have known that the contract was WAY too wooly and actually tied it down to real deliverables.
At renegotiation time, some of the vendors (like Fujitsu) worked out the cost of really doing what the NHS asked for (which was all the project management of the first round, plus a semi accurate spec). Which was a truly staggering figure. More than the NHS could stomach. The two are still in a legal scrap.
Some vendors still kept the lights on in the data centres, and hosted what was there, but those installations are likely going to have to move out of those data centres by about 2015, as they're too expensive to maintain for the few installs.. And none of the vendors want to renew the system contract.
So, the price tag covers all the allocation (it was scaled to host EVERY NHS hospital in the UK, which is most of them), training, consultancy, migration of data (a high precision activity that needs zero data loss on a vast amount of very complex information, coming out of a vast quantity of different databases, and being shoehorned into one uniform schema. Doing this while still providing clinical care (you don't get to shut a hospital down for ripping out the heart of its data systems and replacing them with a new; it's all done while still treating patients and making sure nothing gets mis-recorded).. Training of a huge number of clinical staff (doctors, nurses, and anyone else who needs to use the system inside the NHS), the feeds.. Interfaces between that system and the various disparate ones that it needs to communicate with inside a hospital..
When you look at it, it's a breathtaking proposal, just nobody on high seemed to recognise that, and expected fast results because they said so and waved a fat wallet around. Unsurprisingly it went awry. The current UK government looked at the figures, the legal position and the chances of getting it sorted from a more businesslike side, and canned the bits that wouldn't work (the care records area).
As for the data protection side, that was one of the most heavily guarded I've seen anywhere.. It was pretty robust. The few 'leaks' that happened (people looking at records they shouldn't) were spotted by access audit, and people lost the jobs.. That simple, that strict.
Actual phychological and physical harm (bullying) is ok.. But god forbid you make a drawing of a video to sate your frustrations (or map a photo onto a game avatar, you know, like we used to put pictures on a dartboard).. That's illegal, terroristy and you need to be locked up for that!
Step 1) Someone is found to be bullying, punish them.
Step 2) See a lot of this kind of behaviour vanish.
When you have no presence in a market, and most of your customers are about to enter an upgrade cycle to "your new product", sure, the growth rate is high. There again, iOS and Android have a huge market, close to saturated, yet still growing.
This is akin to saying "my herb garden expanding at a faster rate than a continent filled with forest".
Teenagers are neurologically wired to take risks. It's part of the development of brains; many go on to do circus tricks far more dangerous (hell, American Football is as dangerous; there's zero legitimate reason to run full pelt into another guy who's also running full pelt at you, just to grab a ball.. Yet it's an American national sport that everyone applauds!).
This guy was involved in a scene that often leads to interest in aeronautics and engineering, certainly a more technical side than most, so I don't think he was as 'stupid' as many here seem to think.. He made one mistake, and it was a fatal one.. That's a sad thing..
Sportsmen who push the edge always expose themselves to risk, but they're also the ones that if they survive, everyone applauds the most.
Getting resource to the moon is expensive (fighting against a heavy gravity well). Getting stuff back to earth is pretty cheap.
Once you have the operation set up, it's pretty cheap.
Very few Americans know their history.. A lot remember the revisionist rewrites.. But very few know the histories that were written at the time..
Yes you can.
"Pirating" something on the personal scale would be to take a copy of the program for your use without permission.
Taking the source to sell elsewhere is commercial piracy, which is rightfully pilloried everywhere (I don't think I've seen many, if any, posts here defending commercial pirates; most of the replies I've read have flat out called for a lynch mob. They're in the same social category as spammers).
What you're effectively saying in your post is "You can't commit theft while with the same breath defend copyright infringement". Which, being completely separate things, you can do without the slightest hint of hypocrisy.
It's all part of the Eternal September playing a rush to the bottom.
Trolls have discovered there's very little (if any) consequence to them being as obnoxious as possible, and many have come to realise that if you troll and upset people, they can't let it go as well as a well reasoned argument.
Thus, it seems that if you Troll, you get a response, so more people troll, and the more abusive you are, the more attention is paid (and god forbid, someone deletes the abusive post, as that then ends up noted on all the tech blogs that the developer is censoring).
While things are stacked towards letting trolling pay off, I don't think anything's going to change..
I run an Android tablet, Linux laptop, iPhone and Win7 desktop. Each of them is fine for what I need them to do (they were individually chosen for a particular task)..
The Android tab isn't a Nexus.. It's one of the cheap, but surprisingly good imports (a Rapid5 v2 from a company called A1CS) with a nice flash expansion from a micro SD, USB connector and HDMI out.. Gives me a nice 32GB flash expansion right there, quad core CPU, ability to watch movies (with good quality video and perfectly acceptable audio, though like all these devices, best done using headphones).
I have my dive log on it, some movies, some books through the kindle app for when I'm not toting my kindle (Which I prefer for reading, but can use the tab at a push).. Notepads to write things with.. Tools to play around with photographs.. Pretty much all the things I need to keep myself occupied without having a network available that I need.. As soon as I get a net connection, then there's always the social nets, the web, email etc..
To date, I'm happy with my little Android tab.. The fact that it cost me under £100 means I can take it to dive sites and use the log, without worrying too much if it gets broken (which it hasn't done to date, nor has its predecessor).
Bill Gates made his money from screwing people over and devastating an industry. This saw his personal wealth become huge.
Now, he puts bits of the personal wealth into altruistic things. That's how it used to work (where the industry barons used to sponsor altruistic actions, before the State really got into it).
What he's doing is calling Google as a company out on not doing something that Microsoft is also not doing. If the Google founders end up with the personal wealth he's accumulated, then sure, call them out individually for not doing their bit. If they don't make the billions Gates has done, then perhaps their contributions will also be lesser.
Compare like for like; it's great to do altruistic deeds.. But don't use those as a bludgeoning stick to boost your own ego and agendas...
But some learned wondrous things. And used that to go even deeper. Isn't that what education and learning is all about?
If it appeals to enough groups to stay in print, that's a fair number.;
And everyone magically uses the custom apps which they just happen to have ported to their mobile phones? Or have you got UPS and things in place to tether your desktops to the mobiles or USB dongles? You're still at the mercy of battery, and you still have an outage.
With servers in racks, and UPS, you can keep your core network/servers up for a while, and selectively reduce service at that end. If it comes to having to relocate, your working resource is going to be thoroughly disrupted whatever you're up to. It's expensive to move a company ad-hoc.
Bear in mind that most NHS places barely fund an IT department, let alone one that'll support the costs of encryption to every disk on every machine in a trust.
General policy is usually that you don't save patient identifiable information to a non-server disk. And when you hire a contractor to do a job, you expect it to be done. The fault here isn't with the NHS, it's with a contractor who's supposed to be vetted as secure, offering a service, and then doing something completely stupid.
Would be great if every machine everywhere was 100% secure, but alas, there's not the money or time available in most places.
You really obviously have no idea.
I've done both, and I've seen people swing the lead at both levels. A real IT manager isn't an easy job, but being the one whose plans (the real IT tech) make or break the infrastructure really isn't trivial.
Especially when you're banned from driving at the time you hit the cyclist.
Hey, guess what.. I've been using computers since the days of the Commodore Pet. I was using and supporting microsoft since the days of MSDOS 3... And I was using UNIX before that.
The bones I've had to pick with MS were originally because they had pretty shoddy tools, compared to the UNIX (for DOS), and no multi-tasking. Through the Windows 3 era, I thought it compared poorly to the Apple UI, and it performed absolutely shoddily when compared to OS/2.. I saw MS's marketing engine fire up, and scare people (needlessly) into just using their product, not by dint of superiority, just because they had cash to throw around. Dirty tricks really were the name of the game.
With the advent of Win95, Microsoft actually had a GUI which I had to admit was well thought out. It did what was wanted in a simple and no fuss way. Sure, it was still a layer above DOS, but it was definitely usable, and actually comfortable.. They'd done their homework on that..
Fast forward to now. They force a UI that's pretty decent for a tablet (quite like how it handles on a tablet) onto a desktop.. And I hate it on the desktop.. The idea of using it for Servers is filling me with dread.. The ergonomics of it are atrocious in that use case; I'm just glad you can do everything in Powershell.. That really is going to be the start of a move to 'Core' install, and just run things via powershell. It's mostly how I do it these days, but I do enjoy the flexibility of the Win7 GUI (I think Win7 is the best OS MS have put out to date). I like the tech improvements behind the scenes in Win8, but after using it, I refuse to install it on my home workstation, and work is never going to move to that version (apart from tablets/kiosks, where it shines).
In an attempt to grab the niche market, they seem to be eviscerating their core one.. Which I really just don't understand.. The strategy that would work would be to have an API that works across all the forms (tablet, kiosk, desktop) with a GUI that you can swap between depending on your needs.. If Android releases get the desktop done nicely (and optimised for desktops, not tablets), then MS could be in with a bigger fight than it expects..
In short, it's a good OS ruined by changes that alienate most people. Not just because they "have to learn something new" (which was their big thing about not shifting to Linux), but because it makes changes with no advantage, and quite frequently to their detriment.
The complexity often sets the ceiling.
SQL Server is pretty simple out of the box, and with a reasonable toolset to let you administer it. I trust it to a level. However, cost 'savings' being what they are, a lot of companies who do not understand exactly what it is they're asking, will hire someone who can click the SQL Server buttons on the GUI and change a tape.
They're cheaper than an in depth DBA that groks the environment by a long shot. However, when it comes emergency time, I really don't trust that things will go smoothly.
Oracle has the starting point that you need to know a few of the bits under the hood, so you actually start to understand what's really going on (it tries not to hide the messy details from you), seems to come with the kitchen sink (though occasionally with a fair mortgage as well), and requires staff that actually know what they're about; it actively encourages you to go deeper all the time.
I don't have a problem with a product that's geared for high end enterprise requiring a guru level knowledge to actually get going. At that level, you really should have the skills to back your actions up with.
So, who in the company was the "head of information security"? This is a role that not many think to introduce, and without it, sysadmins who excel in some areas may miss some of the hardening aspects. Hell, if you've got a 'regular' sysadmin who just installs database engines on boxes as well, you don't even have a DBA. That's two corporate strikes on good business practice (the problem goes deeper than the sysadmin; if there was only one full stop, then I'm wondering just how much he was running round trying to deal with the wave of stuff that hit him).
Of course it wasn't fair that you'd tricked the sysadmin; he was right in that. However, the world in general isn't fair, so you were right in that. You did something that would have taken quite a lot of effort from someone outside the company (but does happen).
That being said, the general method of getting specific info is to rock up on site dressed as one of the IT techs and simply go to a user and mention that you're there to do some work for them (replacing their PC with a shiner one is often a strong tactic). Now, if they just leave themselves logged in while you transfer their apps and files to the new one..
Once you have a valid account, the rest is pretty fast. Social engineering attacks are a royal pain, because they rely on the trust that exists to get the job done with any decent pace. The upshot of this, I'd guess, is to get the server reconfigured, and also put policy in place to make sure that all calls for security requests are vetted more thoroughly. This means that what could be done on the phone (which a lot of complaints in this thread want) now has to be ticketed, vetted, and take several hours or days (incidentally, I think that more secure way is the real way to do it), which will have many people up in arms because they want something done NOW. Safe and now are rarely compatible.
Incidentally, there's a very good reason that external security auditors use a lot of diplomacy and objectivity; it's a very tough thing to have all your work dragged through the coals with nothing hidden and everything brought to light. But it is necessary.