John W Colby
jwcolby at gmail.com
Sat Mar 1 23:06:59 CST 2014
And BTW, the thousands of employees using Lenovo laptops at the IBM site I worked at... had a laptop docked, locked down, cabled to the desk, and largely closed, with a keyboard and mouse and two identical monitors. They are imaged and handed to an employee. Each desk just has the keyboard, two monitors and a mouse. Plop the docking station down and cable it to the desk. Plug in the peripherals. The only time the laptop was opened was to use the camera for teleconferencing (lotus live). One logs in and connects the laptop (docking station) to the phone system with a network cable. I could literally (and did) move my laptop from office to office to meeting room to the other coast and back to Raleigh. Whatever room I was in, I would plug in to the phone and go and I was up and connected to my peers. Really quite amazing stuff. In fact the standard joke was that IBM stood for I Be Movin'. I ran as an admin because I was a developer but the average Joe was not an admin. They used Lotus Notes / live because IBM forced them to. But mostly they just powered on, logged in and went to work. At the end of the day they were required to log out, power down, remove the laptop from the docking station and lock the laptop in a drawer. Security teams walked around checking. The third offense of not logging out if you stepped away from your desk, keeping a clean desk (NO papers of any kind) or locking the computer in a drawer at the end of the day and you were fired. Flunkie to (presumably) Exec. If you plugged a usb device into the computer it was logged and sent to IBM security and you (and your manager) immediately received an email about a security violation. The USB device did NOT function, but it was logged / reported that you tried. You may bet your bippy Windows 8 was not in the cards for this environment. I never even heard Windows 8 mentioned the entire year I was there. For that matter I never heard Windows 7 explicitly mentioned. It is not about the OS, it is about the job, and getting it done. John W. Colby Reality is what refuses to go away when you do not believe in it On 3/1/2014 10:49 PM, Doug Steele wrote: > I'm just throwing this out as an observation, but in my 20+ years of > computing, I've never actually encountered a computer running Unix/Linux > (other than during the one day course I took on it about 15 years ago :) ). > > The one (world class) research lab I know about uses Macs. > > The multinational company I've done Access dbs for is Microsoft all the way. > > The mining/engineering company I worked for went from IBM System 3 to > Windows. The requirements they have for Excel processing and Autocad make > Windows compulsory. If you have Windows requirements like they do, going > to Linux/Wine just makes one more expensive layer; the cost for support > personnel is probably an order of magnitude higher than the savings on > software. > > Your mileage obviously varies! > > Doug > --- This email is free from viruses and malware because avast! Antivirus protection is active. http://www.avast.com