On the subject of credit cards you are wrong. They have to notify you in writing when they change their terms of service. Unless you opt out and close your account, you implicitly agree to the new terms. The new consumer protection laws that passed now stipulate that if the card companies change their terms and you don't agree, they have to freeze your account at whatever the terms were before they changed them. You cannot continue to use the account but you can continue to pay it off without any additional penalities, but still subject to the original terms (late / missed payment fees, etc).
In reality the only people who are to blame for poor credit card terms of service are the people who use credit cards. It seems like a portion of population is under the misguided notion that access to credit is a God given right. It isn't. If anything credit is an invention of Satan. It should be used sparingly and responsibly. Other than the occassional cases where people fall onto hard times and use their credit cards to get by, most people are in debt because they decided they wanted something RIGHT NOW and figured that the interest charges were worth it.
Nah, not even a turbo. Just a standard VTEC motor with headers and an intake. Definitely fun to drive and decent on gas mileage, but still well under 200 horsepower.
I agree. I'm not sure where the "scary" angle comes from. The last couple versions of SQL Server have allowed encryption down to the field level. I would be surprised if Oracle and other competitors weren't offering similar functionality. It also makes sense to encrypt the transaction. The law covers two of the three major points of compromise (the database server itself, and main in the middle sniffing on the network).
The argument wasn't about whether or not he "knew" the accused. The argument is that he knows what would be involved in doing what the accused was accused of doing. He says it was impossible that the accused could have done what he did without being noticed. I imagine it would be like the equivalent of trained chemists noticing whether or not one of their colleagues was cooking up kilograms of MDMA over in the corner of the lab.
The "blown out of proportion" aspect of the story was the "threat of terrorism". The anthrax attacks hit the Capitol at the same time legislators were being pressured to pass the PATRIOT Act. The anthrax attacks delivered the unspoken message to our representatives that "nobody is safe from terrorists".
My friends and I used to buy games based in part on the manuals. One of the best manuals ever came from Dynamix when they released Red Baron. It was a very well illustrated history of aviation and aerial warfare during World War One. Another great manual was the Falcon 3.0 bible. Back in the day you could practically judge the depth and quality of a simulator based on the size of the manual. Who can forget all of the old Sierra Online games and the manuals that contained clues about how to play the games?
Times change. Back in the day the manuals added a level of immersion that in many ways helped compensate for the poor graphics and choppy game play. The manuals helped fuel the imagination. Given the extreme realism of games and the computing power available, manuals are less and less necessary. In a lot of FPS games (Fallout 3 and CoD/MW2 come to mind), the tutorial is built into the beginning of the game.
There's a new API to fetch data from Facebook more easily, which sounds great, if only I could figure out why I'd want to do that.
It seems pretty obvious to me. Facebook is making it easier to data mine user information. The blogger who wrote the comment might not see a use for it, but I assure you that Zygna, the three letter agencies, and a whole slew of other organizations get all warm and fuzzy every time Facebook makes it easier to fetch data from the service.
Keep in mind, Facebook is getting ready for an IPO (no matter what Mark says). 90% of everything they do from here on out will be focused on making their offering more attractive to investors, marketers and the like.
The amount of data that is available through services that aren't Facebook is mind boggling. I work for a non-profit and some of the information being offered to us in the guise of "donor research" makes me uncomfortable. I don't like telemarketing. I don't like being approached by people who seem to know more about me than I'd ever volunteer on my own.
I hadn't even heard about "PRIZM" until a week or so ago.
It seems to me that at the end of the day it comes down to consumerism. If a person feels comfortable with being marketed to, and enjoys consumerism and spending money and being up to date with information about new products, then that person won't really care if Facebook or anyone else makes it easy to market to them. On the other hand if a person enjoys a modicium of privacy and does not particularly enjoy being classified and analyzed and pigeon-holed by people they've never met, then the activities of sites like Facebook upset them.
Personally, I don't care too much. About a decade ago I read a book titled "Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion". It was written by a professor at the University of Arizona and is a great guide that covers the methodolies used by marketers, salespeople, and so on. Once the mind becomes aware of the underlying mechanisms by which decisions are influenced, it becomes fairly simple to automatically avoid attempts at manipulation.
It will be interesting to see what happens to the "creative professionals" who use Adobe software. I only support OSX in my environment because all of the designers want to use it. The rest of the network runs Windows and our core applications are all Windows apps that lack alternatives on other platforms. If I were in Microsoft marketing, I would be taking this squabble and running with it. Remember the Apple ads that claimed the best hardware to run Vista on was a Mac? It would be funny to see ads claiming the best platform to run Creative Suite on is Win7 x64... on hardware that costs significantly less, where you don't have to pay for OS service packs.
Of course the afforementioned creative professionals wouldn't switch platforms unless left without any other alternatives. They'd rather cut off their nose to spite their face. No way could you ever get some hipster graphics designer to run Windows, even if it does run his key apps much faster.
It is really interesting to see Adobe and Apple not getting along. For as long as I can remember the primary users of Apple hardware were "creative professionals". All of those users were using Apple because of Photoshop and the various other Adobe tools. Even when Adobe put their tools out for Windows, 99% of the creative professionals preferred to continue using them on Apple hardware. In much the same way that people claim, "I have a Windows box to play games on.", others would claim, "I have a Mac to do creative work on."
Now that Apple has had some success outside of their previously small, niche market, they seem to be taking a big crap on one of their largest supporters. It is an interesting example of power dynamics in the real world. Apple apparently doesn't lend much weight to their long term relationship, or what Adobe has done for them in the past. It seems to be all about Apple saying, "What have you done for me lately?"
Stay FAR away from Basecamp. We used it at my organization for about six months before running far, far away from it. 37Signals was very unprofessional. They would push major project changes out without any heads up and end up breaking all sorts of functionality. Any requests for improvements or new features were met with an attitude of, "If you don't like the way we designed the software, fuck off and go use something else. We don't care."
It relies on information from the OS. The OS is too easy to circumuvent. For example, it doesn't report on whether or not the system has been booted from a USB device. Given that they are the NSA, maybe they have the luxury of making the assumption that USB boot is disabled and the BIOS is password protected?
Personally, I find it more curious that if he was willing to fork out so much cash and he was writing a book that he didn't contact Microsoft support and paid for someone to assist him with finding out where it was borking, and why.
If he did that he would have to acknowledge that Microsoft support actually does a very good job of resolving issues with their software. I'm talking about support for production environments, not patching the latest zero day security hole. The author in question probably didn't call support because he knew he was running unsupported hardware. It might be slightly inconvenient to find hardware on the HCL, but that HCL is there for a reason. It provides a known good baseline to troubleshoot against when things go wrong.
Huh? When they login, they get app configuration updates - the same way you send OS configuration updates
What about security patches and issues when they're on the road? I know sales people who go months without visiting the office. They're also the ones plugging into client networks and public, shared access spots where they are most vulnerable. I think your average customer would be happier with the situation where their data isn't living on a random laptop in the back of some sales person's car. They'd rather that their data is living on a secure server somewhere and being accessed by an application without any local persistence.
Please, where is Firefox's default MSI? It's taken me 5 of your 15 minutes to fail at finding it, so I may be lacking competence tonight.
I was confusing the MSI file with the ADM template to manage it. I took a while with MakeMSI to actually get the MSI file made. A quick Google search turns up that FrontMotion used MakeMSI to create their Firefox installer.
MakeMSI isn't point and click simplicity. If you can write scripts to push out patches, you can handle it though.
You have to patch the OS and browser anyway, so you're already having to manage patches across thousands of desktops. What goes particularly wrong with Office patches?
My question is why do you want to continue doing it that way? There are all ready too many patches to manage. Office is decent because it is integrated into the Windows Update mechanism. Are you trying to stick to your original point, or do you really believe that centralized management is a bad idea? Why do you want the extra step? Why maintain the extra complexity?
You could go next door to your neighbor and borrow a cup of sugar. Or, you could build a wall between you and your neighbor, then climb over the wall and borrow a cup of sugar. If you don't have to build a wall in the first place, why do it? If the wall is already there and someone wants to tear it down for you, why do you insist that you want to keep climbing over it?
(2) productivity was measured by what meant IT had to do slightly less work rather than how efficiently everyone else in the firm could work,
What is more efficient? Rolling out patches to the desktops, or having one application in one location that is always up to date?
Could you explain in what way setting up a profile and sending a login (or a link to a script which sets up the login) is more arduous than setting up a profile and sending a URL plus login details?
A profile needs to be setup. Even if you have a roaming profile, it still takes time for the OS to load it. I think Outlook 2007 will auto-configure Exchange connectivity based on Active Directory credentials, but prior to that it required specific configuration for each user account. In the case of part-time employees there can be one generic login for the department and anyone can use the URL to access their individual mailbox. Without the web access they would have to switch their user context. That requires either giving the logged in account access to everyone's mailbox (at least everyone who wants to check mail on that workstation), or it requires a user switch (log off / log on).
Clearly, but what's so difficult in a managed enterprise about getting every PC to run a simple configuration script? If the answer is "well, many of the PCs are fucked and have very unreliable setups", you're not going to get a uniform experience over your heterogeneous browser client environment either - and probably need to replace your IT department.
Laptops on the road are the primary example. Workstations that need to be off of the domain for whatever reason (QA test labs, security PC doing badge creation, etc). The question for you is why do you want to do it the hard way? Why do you want to have to push out a script to client machines at all? Is there some part of you that misses autoexec.bat?
Could you provide a link, please?
I used Firefox's default MSI and rolled my own package using SMS2003. It took all of fifteen minutes.
Can vs should.
I suppose you can opt to do things the hard way. Given the increased incidence of application exploits and the increased frequency of patch cycles necessary to mitigate those exploits, I'd rather patch one central application than manage patches across thousands of desktops.
You can hold whatever opinion you want about fat versus thin clients and apps on the workstations versus centralized apps on the server. Opinions don't change the reality that the landscape is shifting back to thin clients and powerful servers. Nobody in their right mind wants to manage thousands of separate installations when presented with the option to manage ONE. In much the same way, who wants to manage 15 separate servers and islands of disk space when you can manage one physical box with 15 VMs and a SAN?
Look at Outlook Web Access. If your users are on IE, they get 95% of the functionality of Outlook without the license cost. A couple years ago we had to setup temporary / part time employees with their own Outlook profile. Now we just give them the URL and that's it.
Yet you "bet" on the opposite outcome, namely that MS will move to a web Office.
That's your interpretation of what my bet is, and your misunderstanding is probably due to my lack of clarity. Microsoft won't move Office onto the web. They will reproduce enough of the functionality to mitigate what Google and other competitors are trying to do. The question comes down to whether or not Microsoft can port their functionality to the web faster than Google et al can recreate it from the ground up on the web. A balance will be found between the two approaches, at least until virtualization and SANs are so ubiquitous at the LAN / private WAN level that organizations can host the "online" version of Office in house. Ie, the pendulum will swing back to thin clients and powerful servers.
So technical... IE is not a usable browser for anything Web2.0, and Firefox (the best alternative) had awful enterprise management last I checked... but maybe they're delivering MSIs etc now.
By the time Microsoft rolls out a worth while online version of Office, whatever version of IE that comes bundled with the OS will support it. Firefox does have decent MSI installers and also.ADM files so that you can use GPOs to configure it. I'm not a big fan of Firefox, but I'll correct FUD anywhere I see it.
At the enterprise level, configuring Office beyond facilities provided by copious centralised management tools can be done the same way you configure any Windows app: a couple of clicks to push a script to all client machines.
In an online model you don't even have to run scripts on the clients. You configure the app in one place and the relevent settings are loaded when the clients connect to the app. It's like Citrix, or Terminal Services (or Application Server, or whatever the heck MS is calling their product these days).
The "cloud" model might suck in a lot of ways. It does shine in application management though. You don't have to track your application across hundreds or thousands of desktops. You have one single installation of the application.
The weird part is, that when you account for full lifetime pensions after 20 years, having three guys watch one guy dig, and govt wages far higher than private wages, its probably cheaper to give away Apple products than to pay DPW to do it for you...
Cities are starting to outsource things. Where I live, the city outsourced graffiti removal to a sub-contractor. The response time is great and because there is competition in the market, it encourages the contractor to do a good job. It is only a matter of time before pot hole fillers and all the rest are outsourced as well. When I was a kid, the city used to handle the sewers. Now they bring in contractors when it is time to tear up the street and replace broken pipes. I think it's a good thing. The city doesn't have to eat the maintenance on all of the heavy equipment, and doesn't have to keep specialized operators who drive the equipment on the payroll.
You could just substitute research for "betting" and observe what MS is actually doing with their next release: building a limited online version of Office, but selling the usual feature-complete local tools which take advantage of the speed, reliability, connectivity and UI of a native app.
I could research, but having been in IT for over a decade at this point, I will continue to "bet" until applications are actually in production. Until then, it's all vapourware as far as I'm concerned. In this case my bet is based on Microsoft's claims that they are going to offer Office online. We'll see how it works. A couple of months ago, I read a few reviews where everyone was bemoaning how much it sucks and how far it has to go.
Seriously, a reason to use Google Docs over Office is that it's harder to install Office than a web browser?
If you want to get technical, it IS harder to install Office than a browser. The browser (IE) comes pre-installed. Office requires an installer. Even if you are pushing it out via GPO, or Systems Center, you still have to have a mechanism to get the application configured on the end user's device. If you move it onto the web, all you have to do is provision it once and maybe authorize the user's account in Active Directory or whatever.
I find Office much easier to deploy than Firefox...
As for Firefox versus Office, they're pretty much the same. You configure your installer package and associate it with whatever OU you want to deploy it. The rest is automatic.
The more civic functions that we are able to move online, the better. I live in Long Beach, CA and the city has a graffiti hotline. The one time I used it, the graffiti that I reported was cleaned up less than 24 hours later. The system involves having to leave a voice mail, and the recording time is way too short. It would be much easier to be able to upload digital pictures, or even click the relative location on a map and type in a short description. It would make dispatching the tickets easier too on the city's end.
I'm sure that there will be some who decry the big brother potential of the system. They will worry about nosey neighbors and the spectre of authoritarianism intruding into their lives. I wonder how many of those people actually live in neighborhoods that are right on the border between "nice" and "not so nice". In those neighborhoods, community activism and participation are key in reversing the slide toward the "not so nice" end of the spectrum. All it takes for a neighborhood to decay is for the residents to remain apathetic for long enough. Soon enough all of the "little" things start to add up.
How does Google docs handle access to shared resources? In my mind I see "official" logos approved by the marketing department, or spreadsheets and diagrams put out by the finance department. In the current model, resources are kept in file shares and access is controlled by security tokens issued at login. What is Google going to do to offer similar functionality in the cloud? How are they going to provide controlled access to often used resources? Another example might be a document template (ie. a press release, etc).
The same question goes for Microsoft and other companies who are trying to move their productivity applications into "the cloud". How are they going to integrate the products into their directory so that access to resources can be controlled? How are they going to provide shared storage for often used assets?
There is nothing convenient about Google Docs. If I want to do anything simple, Office is good enough and has better availability, speed, familiarity (including native UI integration) and stability. If I want to do anything complex, only Office will provide it.
I'm willing to bet that within a couple of years, Office will be just as "online" and "in the cloud" as Google docs is. It would be great to just give users a laptop and a web browser without having to install Office. Rather than install Office, they can be pointed toward whatever URL accesses the online version of their application.
One only needs to pick up any copy of the Wall Street Journal from the past couple of months to know that Oracle bought Sun for the hardware. On the front page of every edition there is an advertisement comparing Sun and IBM hardware. "Sun 7 times the performance, IBM 6 times the power consumption."
When the cost of the fix is more than the benefit of the cure, the fix won't be implemented. Despite the cost of fraud, there are mechanisms in place to deal with it. The costs are built into the fees that merchants pay credit card processors and other financial institutions. The merchants just view it as a cost of doing business. They will process hundreds or thousands of legit transactions for every individual fraudulant one. Consumers are (for the most part) indemnified for fraudulant charges. Fraud is so prevelant that most banks and credit card companies don't even think twice when a customer calls up to dispute a charge. In the two cases that I have had my credentials compromised, I wasn't held liable for the charges and I had a new account in less than 30 minutes after notifying my bank that my previous account had been compromised.
To make a bad analogy, fraud is like getting injured. People break their legs / arms / etc and go to the emergency room. Their bones are set and placed in a cast. Eventually they heal and life goes on. It would be great to coat everything in a super safe layer of rubber to prevent impact related bone breaks, but the reality of the situation is that doing so is too expensive. We're better off having a process in place to deal with broken bones.
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On the subject of credit cards you are wrong. They have to notify you in writing when they change their terms of service. Unless you opt out and close your account, you implicitly agree to the new terms. The new consumer protection laws that passed now stipulate that if the card companies change their terms and you don't agree, they have to freeze your account at whatever the terms were before they changed them. You cannot continue to use the account but you can continue to pay it off without any additional penalities, but still subject to the original terms (late / missed payment fees, etc).
In reality the only people who are to blame for poor credit card terms of service are the people who use credit cards. It seems like a portion of population is under the misguided notion that access to credit is a God given right. It isn't. If anything credit is an invention of Satan. It should be used sparingly and responsibly. Other than the occassional cases where people fall onto hard times and use their credit cards to get by, most people are in debt because they decided they wanted something RIGHT NOW and figured that the interest charges were worth it.
Nah, not even a turbo. Just a standard VTEC motor with headers and an intake. Definitely fun to drive and decent on gas mileage, but still well under 200 horsepower.
Have they confiscated enough of them to thoroughly document them enough to begin the reverse engineering process?
I agree. I'm not sure where the "scary" angle comes from. The last couple versions of SQL Server have allowed encryption down to the field level. I would be surprised if Oracle and other competitors weren't offering similar functionality. It also makes sense to encrypt the transaction. The law covers two of the three major points of compromise (the database server itself, and main in the middle sniffing on the network).
The argument wasn't about whether or not he "knew" the accused. The argument is that he knows what would be involved in doing what the accused was accused of doing. He says it was impossible that the accused could have done what he did without being noticed. I imagine it would be like the equivalent of trained chemists noticing whether or not one of their colleagues was cooking up kilograms of MDMA over in the corner of the lab.
The "blown out of proportion" aspect of the story was the "threat of terrorism". The anthrax attacks hit the Capitol at the same time legislators were being pressured to pass the PATRIOT Act. The anthrax attacks delivered the unspoken message to our representatives that "nobody is safe from terrorists".
My friends and I used to buy games based in part on the manuals. One of the best manuals ever came from Dynamix when they released Red Baron. It was a very well illustrated history of aviation and aerial warfare during World War One. Another great manual was the Falcon 3.0 bible. Back in the day you could practically judge the depth and quality of a simulator based on the size of the manual. Who can forget all of the old Sierra Online games and the manuals that contained clues about how to play the games?
Times change. Back in the day the manuals added a level of immersion that in many ways helped compensate for the poor graphics and choppy game play. The manuals helped fuel the imagination. Given the extreme realism of games and the computing power available, manuals are less and less necessary. In a lot of FPS games (Fallout 3 and CoD/MW2 come to mind), the tutorial is built into the beginning of the game.
There's a new API to fetch data from Facebook more easily, which sounds great, if only I could figure out why I'd want to do that.
It seems pretty obvious to me. Facebook is making it easier to data mine user information. The blogger who wrote the comment might not see a use for it, but I assure you that Zygna, the three letter agencies, and a whole slew of other organizations get all warm and fuzzy every time Facebook makes it easier to fetch data from the service.
Keep in mind, Facebook is getting ready for an IPO (no matter what Mark says). 90% of everything they do from here on out will be focused on making their offering more attractive to investors, marketers and the like.
The amount of data that is available through services that aren't Facebook is mind boggling. I work for a non-profit and some of the information being offered to us in the guise of "donor research" makes me uncomfortable. I don't like telemarketing. I don't like being approached by people who seem to know more about me than I'd ever volunteer on my own.
I hadn't even heard about "PRIZM" until a week or so ago.
http://en-us.nielsen.com/tab/product_families/nielsen_claritas/prizm
It seems to me that at the end of the day it comes down to consumerism. If a person feels comfortable with being marketed to, and enjoys consumerism and spending money and being up to date with information about new products, then that person won't really care if Facebook or anyone else makes it easy to market to them. On the other hand if a person enjoys a modicium of privacy and does not particularly enjoy being classified and analyzed and pigeon-holed by people they've never met, then the activities of sites like Facebook upset them.
Personally, I don't care too much. About a decade ago I read a book titled "Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion". It was written by a professor at the University of Arizona and is a great guide that covers the methodolies used by marketers, salespeople, and so on. Once the mind becomes aware of the underlying mechanisms by which decisions are influenced, it becomes fairly simple to automatically avoid attempts at manipulation.
It will be interesting to see what happens to the "creative professionals" who use Adobe software. I only support OSX in my environment because all of the designers want to use it. The rest of the network runs Windows and our core applications are all Windows apps that lack alternatives on other platforms. If I were in Microsoft marketing, I would be taking this squabble and running with it. Remember the Apple ads that claimed the best hardware to run Vista on was a Mac? It would be funny to see ads claiming the best platform to run Creative Suite on is Win7 x64... on hardware that costs significantly less, where you don't have to pay for OS service packs.
Of course the afforementioned creative professionals wouldn't switch platforms unless left without any other alternatives. They'd rather cut off their nose to spite their face. No way could you ever get some hipster graphics designer to run Windows, even if it does run his key apps much faster.
It is really interesting to see Adobe and Apple not getting along. For as long as I can remember the primary users of Apple hardware were "creative professionals". All of those users were using Apple because of Photoshop and the various other Adobe tools. Even when Adobe put their tools out for Windows, 99% of the creative professionals preferred to continue using them on Apple hardware. In much the same way that people claim, "I have a Windows box to play games on.", others would claim, "I have a Mac to do creative work on."
Now that Apple has had some success outside of their previously small, niche market, they seem to be taking a big crap on one of their largest supporters. It is an interesting example of power dynamics in the real world. Apple apparently doesn't lend much weight to their long term relationship, or what Adobe has done for them in the past. It seems to be all about Apple saying, "What have you done for me lately?"
Stay FAR away from Basecamp. We used it at my organization for about six months before running far, far away from it. 37Signals was very unprofessional. They would push major project changes out without any heads up and end up breaking all sorts of functionality. Any requests for improvements or new features were met with an attitude of, "If you don't like the way we designed the software, fuck off and go use something else. We don't care."
It relies on information from the OS. The OS is too easy to circumuvent. For example, it doesn't report on whether or not the system has been booted from a USB device. Given that they are the NSA, maybe they have the luxury of making the assumption that USB boot is disabled and the BIOS is password protected?
The phone takes 720p HD video. It also has speakers and so I'm going to make a wild ass guess here and suggest that it plays MP3s also.
Personally, I find it more curious that if he was willing to fork out so much cash and he was writing a book that he didn't contact Microsoft support and paid for someone to assist him with finding out where it was borking, and why.
If he did that he would have to acknowledge that Microsoft support actually does a very good job of resolving issues with their software. I'm talking about support for production environments, not patching the latest zero day security hole. The author in question probably didn't call support because he knew he was running unsupported hardware. It might be slightly inconvenient to find hardware on the HCL, but that HCL is there for a reason. It provides a known good baseline to troubleshoot against when things go wrong.
Laptops on the road are the primary example.
Huh? When they login, they get app configuration updates - the same way you send OS configuration updates
What about security patches and issues when they're on the road? I know sales people who go months without visiting the office. They're also the ones plugging into client networks and public, shared access spots where they are most vulnerable. I think your average customer would be happier with the situation where their data isn't living on a random laptop in the back of some sales person's car. They'd rather that their data is living on a secure server somewhere and being accessed by an application without any local persistence.
Please, where is Firefox's default MSI? It's taken me 5 of your 15 minutes to fail at finding it, so I may be lacking competence tonight.
I was confusing the MSI file with the ADM template to manage it. I took a while with MakeMSI to actually get the MSI file made. A quick Google search turns up that FrontMotion used MakeMSI to create their Firefox installer.
http://makemsi-manual.dennisbareis.com/some_users_of_makemsi.htm
MakeMSI isn't point and click simplicity. If you can write scripts to push out patches, you can handle it though.
You have to patch the OS and browser anyway, so you're already having to manage patches across thousands of desktops. What goes particularly wrong with Office patches?
My question is why do you want to continue doing it that way? There are all ready too many patches to manage. Office is decent because it is integrated into the Windows Update mechanism. Are you trying to stick to your original point, or do you really believe that centralized management is a bad idea? Why do you want the extra step? Why maintain the extra complexity?
You could go next door to your neighbor and borrow a cup of sugar. Or, you could build a wall between you and your neighbor, then climb over the wall and borrow a cup of sugar. If you don't have to build a wall in the first place, why do it? If the wall is already there and someone wants to tear it down for you, why do you insist that you want to keep climbing over it?
(2) productivity was measured by what meant IT had to do slightly less work rather than how efficiently everyone else in the firm could work,
What is more efficient? Rolling out patches to the desktops, or having one application in one location that is always up to date?
Could you explain in what way setting up a profile and sending a login (or a link to a script which sets up the login) is more arduous than setting up a profile and sending a URL plus login details?
A profile needs to be setup. Even if you have a roaming profile, it still takes time for the OS to load it. I think Outlook 2007 will auto-configure Exchange connectivity based on Active Directory credentials, but prior to that it required specific configuration for each user account. In the case of part-time employees there can be one generic login for the department and anyone can use the URL to access their individual mailbox. Without the web access they would have to switch their user context. That requires either giving the logged in account access to everyone's mailbox (at least everyone who wants to check mail on that workstation), or it requires a user switch (log off / log on).
Clearly, but what's so difficult in a managed enterprise about getting every PC to run a simple configuration script? If the answer is "well, many of the PCs are fucked and have very unreliable setups", you're not going to get a uniform experience over your heterogeneous browser client environment either - and probably need to replace your IT department.
Laptops on the road are the primary example. Workstations that need to be off of the domain for whatever reason (QA test labs, security PC doing badge creation, etc). The question for you is why do you want to do it the hard way? Why do you want to have to push out a script to client machines at all? Is there some part of you that misses autoexec.bat?
Could you provide a link, please?
I used Firefox's default MSI and rolled my own package using SMS2003. It took all of fifteen minutes.
Can vs should.
I suppose you can opt to do things the hard way. Given the increased incidence of application exploits and the increased frequency of patch cycles necessary to mitigate those exploits, I'd rather patch one central application than manage patches across thousands of desktops.
You can hold whatever opinion you want about fat versus thin clients and apps on the workstations versus centralized apps on the server. Opinions don't change the reality that the landscape is shifting back to thin clients and powerful servers. Nobody in their right mind wants to manage thousands of separate installations when presented with the option to manage ONE. In much the same way, who wants to manage 15 separate servers and islands of disk space when you can manage one physical box with 15 VMs and a SAN?
Look at Outlook Web Access. If your users are on IE, they get 95% of the functionality of Outlook without the license cost. A couple years ago we had to setup temporary / part time employees with their own Outlook profile. Now we just give them the URL and that's it.
Yet you "bet" on the opposite outcome, namely that MS will move to a web Office.
That's your interpretation of what my bet is, and your misunderstanding is probably due to my lack of clarity. Microsoft won't move Office onto the web. They will reproduce enough of the functionality to mitigate what Google and other competitors are trying to do. The question comes down to whether or not Microsoft can port their functionality to the web faster than Google et al can recreate it from the ground up on the web. A balance will be found between the two approaches, at least until virtualization and SANs are so ubiquitous at the LAN / private WAN level that organizations can host the "online" version of Office in house. Ie, the pendulum will swing back to thin clients and powerful servers.
So technical... IE is not a usable browser for anything Web2.0, and Firefox (the best alternative) had awful enterprise management last I checked... but maybe they're delivering MSIs etc now.
By the time Microsoft rolls out a worth while online version of Office, whatever version of IE that comes bundled with the OS will support it. Firefox does have decent MSI installers and also .ADM files so that you can use GPOs to configure it. I'm not a big fan of Firefox, but I'll correct FUD anywhere I see it.
At the enterprise level, configuring Office beyond facilities provided by copious centralised management tools can be done the same way you configure any Windows app: a couple of clicks to push a script to all client machines.
In an online model you don't even have to run scripts on the clients. You configure the app in one place and the relevent settings are loaded when the clients connect to the app. It's like Citrix, or Terminal Services (or Application Server, or whatever the heck MS is calling their product these days).
The "cloud" model might suck in a lot of ways. It does shine in application management though. You don't have to track your application across hundreds or thousands of desktops. You have one single installation of the application.
The weird part is, that when you account for full lifetime pensions after 20 years, having three guys watch one guy dig, and govt wages far higher than private wages, its probably cheaper to give away Apple products than to pay DPW to do it for you...
Cities are starting to outsource things. Where I live, the city outsourced graffiti removal to a sub-contractor. The response time is great and because there is competition in the market, it encourages the contractor to do a good job. It is only a matter of time before pot hole fillers and all the rest are outsourced as well. When I was a kid, the city used to handle the sewers. Now they bring in contractors when it is time to tear up the street and replace broken pipes. I think it's a good thing. The city doesn't have to eat the maintenance on all of the heavy equipment, and doesn't have to keep specialized operators who drive the equipment on the payroll.
You could just substitute research for "betting" and observe what MS is actually doing with their next release: building a limited online version of Office, but selling the usual feature-complete local tools which take advantage of the speed, reliability, connectivity and UI of a native app.
I could research, but having been in IT for over a decade at this point, I will continue to "bet" until applications are actually in production. Until then, it's all vapourware as far as I'm concerned. In this case my bet is based on Microsoft's claims that they are going to offer Office online. We'll see how it works. A couple of months ago, I read a few reviews where everyone was bemoaning how much it sucks and how far it has to go.
Seriously, a reason to use Google Docs over Office is that it's harder to install Office than a web browser?
If you want to get technical, it IS harder to install Office than a browser. The browser (IE) comes pre-installed. Office requires an installer. Even if you are pushing it out via GPO, or Systems Center, you still have to have a mechanism to get the application configured on the end user's device. If you move it onto the web, all you have to do is provision it once and maybe authorize the user's account in Active Directory or whatever.
I find Office much easier to deploy than Firefox...
As for Firefox versus Office, they're pretty much the same. You configure your installer package and associate it with whatever OU you want to deploy it. The rest is automatic.
The more civic functions that we are able to move online, the better. I live in Long Beach, CA and the city has a graffiti hotline. The one time I used it, the graffiti that I reported was cleaned up less than 24 hours later. The system involves having to leave a voice mail, and the recording time is way too short. It would be much easier to be able to upload digital pictures, or even click the relative location on a map and type in a short description. It would make dispatching the tickets easier too on the city's end.
I'm sure that there will be some who decry the big brother potential of the system. They will worry about nosey neighbors and the spectre of authoritarianism intruding into their lives. I wonder how many of those people actually live in neighborhoods that are right on the border between "nice" and "not so nice". In those neighborhoods, community activism and participation are key in reversing the slide toward the "not so nice" end of the spectrum. All it takes for a neighborhood to decay is for the residents to remain apathetic for long enough. Soon enough all of the "little" things start to add up.
How does Google docs handle access to shared resources? In my mind I see "official" logos approved by the marketing department, or spreadsheets and diagrams put out by the finance department. In the current model, resources are kept in file shares and access is controlled by security tokens issued at login. What is Google going to do to offer similar functionality in the cloud? How are they going to provide controlled access to often used resources? Another example might be a document template (ie. a press release, etc).
The same question goes for Microsoft and other companies who are trying to move their productivity applications into "the cloud". How are they going to integrate the products into their directory so that access to resources can be controlled? How are they going to provide shared storage for often used assets?
There is nothing convenient about Google Docs. If I want to do anything simple, Office is good enough and has better availability, speed, familiarity (including native UI integration) and stability. If I want to do anything complex, only Office will provide it.
I'm willing to bet that within a couple of years, Office will be just as "online" and "in the cloud" as Google docs is. It would be great to just give users a laptop and a web browser without having to install Office. Rather than install Office, they can be pointed toward whatever URL accesses the online version of their application.
One only needs to pick up any copy of the Wall Street Journal from the past couple of months to know that Oracle bought Sun for the hardware. On the front page of every edition there is an advertisement comparing Sun and IBM hardware. "Sun 7 times the performance, IBM 6 times the power consumption."
I'm using way too many comas.
If you were putting your comas to good use, you wouldn't have enough consciousness left to over-use the commas.
When the cost of the fix is more than the benefit of the cure, the fix won't be implemented. Despite the cost of fraud, there are mechanisms in place to deal with it. The costs are built into the fees that merchants pay credit card processors and other financial institutions. The merchants just view it as a cost of doing business. They will process hundreds or thousands of legit transactions for every individual fraudulant one. Consumers are (for the most part) indemnified for fraudulant charges. Fraud is so prevelant that most banks and credit card companies don't even think twice when a customer calls up to dispute a charge. In the two cases that I have had my credentials compromised, I wasn't held liable for the charges and I had a new account in less than 30 minutes after notifying my bank that my previous account had been compromised.
To make a bad analogy, fraud is like getting injured. People break their legs / arms / etc and go to the emergency room. Their bones are set and placed in a cast. Eventually they heal and life goes on. It would be great to coat everything in a super safe layer of rubber to prevent impact related bone breaks, but the reality of the situation is that doing so is too expensive. We're better off having a process in place to deal with broken bones.