That's poor. My lad will be getting a free Raspberry-Pi like computer when he starts secondary school next year. Every kid in the country gets one when they're 11.

That's the way it's always been done?

Years ago, it was generally accepted that Microsoft products weren't very secure and that you wouldn't want to expose them. But it's 2017 now, and I'm not sure that assumption still applies.

People used to explain it to me by saying "cuz it's Microsoft, duh..". Now I need to know specifics on how an attack on an exposed MS product could play out and why.

I'm only using Exchange as an example, I'm also interested in Window VPN and IIS.

Not quite everything, I guess. We mainly use Hamachi for remote workers to access the corporate intranet, which is running on Windows 2003 Server. I believe Pertino won't support this

I've fallen at the first hurdle.

We still have a number of bespoke legacy applications that only run on XP. The cost to replace these is around $70k, which is a massive sum for a company our size. I'm not too worried about security (but a little). I've disabled internet access on them, which I'm hoping prevents the majority of problems (correct me if I'm wrong). I don't think we're making poor business decisions - it's a decision based on the cost of mitigating the risks, which is something we have to do all the time.

Like I said above, he likes programming Python, nothing to do with gaming.

I used to use Webroot's cloud based e-mail filtering service and it was awesome. By far the best solution that I found (I trialled several - Postini, Mimecast etc etc). I loved it. Unfortunately, they killed the product.

I guess that IE is rendering in Quirks Mode. Try adding font-size:0; to your style. That hack should tell IE not to resize the height of the DIV to whatever it wants.

We have specialist machines for testing our products. The software that these run on only runs on XP. I'm not sure why, maybe it's a 32-bit thing., It is provided by the Italian manufacturer of the machines. We don't have access to the code and I don't know much about it. They may be ripping us off, for all I know.

We also have a number of DOS and dBase III applications. I'm not sure what the DOS applications were written in. We don't have the code. We have the code for the dBase III applications, for what it's worth. These are all bespoke applications written by former employees of companies that we've bought. The programmers have long since disappeared. This is the downside of allowing employees to write custom applications. dBase III! It's ridiculous that a company is relying on dBase III in 2014, but there you go. It is a least rock solid.

^ Failed.

I got an Asus Chromebox a while ago and I like it, but I can't seem to find a reliable way to remote desktop onto a Windows machine, which is one of the main things I would want to do with it.

I thought I would have a look at an Asus VivoPC. This is a mini-PC with more or less the same specs as the Chromebox - both have a 1.4GHz Celeron CPU and 2GB RAM. The VivoPC comes with a 500GB SATA drive rather than the 16GB SSD of the Chromebox. The VivoPC comes with the tragically titled "Windows 8.1 with Bing". Both have a LAN port and Wifi, a DisplayPort and an HDMI port. The VivoPC has 6 USB ports whilst the Chromebox only has 4 and the VivoPC also has an SD card slot.

I hadn't paid much attention to the specs when I bought it. I was expecting a similar product to the Chromebox. The first thing that struck me was the size and weight. This thing is about three times the size of Chromebox and three times the weight:

Here we see the tiny Chromebox sitting on top of the massive VivoPC:

I thought I'd have a look inside and was shocked to see that the cause of the massive size and weight is the fact that if comes with a large format drive:

When I take out this drive and replace it with a spare SSD I have lying the thing loses all its weight and now weights the same as the Chromebox, but I'm left with a massive case that is full of air:

Pros:
I prefer Windows 8.1 to ChromeOS
Easy to upgrade - you can upgrade the RAM and the HDD. The Chromebox is a sealed unit, so you can't do anything with it.

Cons:
Size and weight.

To be fair, I probably bought the wrong model, but it was the only one available at my supplier at the time for a decent price. They are now selling the much smaller VivoMini for a mere GBP114 ($172) which is the same size as the Chromebox and comes without RAM, HDD or OS.

@scottalanmiller said:

Exchange won't change those issues though. PSTs will act the same.

Yeah, but OSTs will fix the issue and work really well. I assume Macs use OSTs the same as Windows? I still prefer the Outlook client to OWA - though the difference are getting pretty small now in Exchange.

@scottalanmiller said:

Anyone notice that some fonts changed with the update to 64bit?

Yes. A lot of fonts have gone tiny as well.

I tried uninstalling and re-installing 32-bit, but that didn't go to well.

I note that OWA for Exchange 2010 doesn't work properly in the latest version of Chrome as well, which is a bit of a pain.

It's almost enough to make me go back to IE (not really).

@scottalanmiller said:

This might be true for web designers or marketers but web site quality doesn't demonstrate IT skills. The best Cisco Admin in the world might not know good graphical design, web server administration or how to market himself. Don't judge skill X by skill Y.

I don't mean aesthetically, I'm talking about quality content. It can use Comic Sans and use the blink tag for all I care (not really).

I guess the next milestone will be @scottalanmiller hitting 10k.

I've run InTune for our some of our remote workers for a few years now. We got it more or less when it was released. It has improved a lot since then, but I've generally hated it. We got it because we needed Windows Enterprise licences for DirectAccess; remote assistance; antivirus; patch management; and MDM.

I abandoned DirectAccess and use Hamachi instead. The remote assistance part of InTune is dire, and I quickly replaced it with LogMeIn. The antivirus didn't stop some of our Sales Reps getting infected, and I had to use a third-party antivirus program to clean up the mess. The patch management is ok, but LogMeIn does that very well too. The MDM is mediocre and I replaced it with Meraki.

To conclude, InTune does everything poorly compared with its competitors. I now do everything I need much quicker, easier and cheaper with LogMeIn and Merkai, apart from security. For security, I like the look of GFI Cloud, but haven't rolled it out yet. The concept of one portal handling everything (InTune) is very attractive and should be cheaper (in theory), but I now prefer a best of breed approach. So to answer the thread's question: No and No.

I can assure you I'm not an iPhone user for the prestige though. I have no prestige. So you can put me in the 1% there.

If you like rain then I can recommend Wales.

Good work @Minion-Queen and thanks for setting this up. Any chance you can get rid of the down voting feature as I hate the negative vibes it creates. Apart from that, great work!

My company is looking at implementing lean methodologies and/or Goldratt’s Theory of Constraints. This isn't an IT thing, so I don't know if I should be posting here. But you're all clever people with interesting views, and Lean thinking is very much part of the IT industry today (I've changed the way I run the IT department based on stuff I've read and scene on Agile Development, which comes from Lean thinking). This post really just a request for comments post as I try and get my head round a few things. I’ve read a couple of books, and watched a lot of YouTube videos, and my head is spinning.

Parkinson’s Law states that “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion”. In any organisation people develop procedures which, whilst they may have made sense at the time, quickly become redundant and add nothing to the company’s bottom line or do nothing to better serve customers. There are procedures that are done because “we’ve always done them”. This could be producing a report that no-one bothers to read, or over-engineering a product with features that customers don’t actually use. In many cases, people will develop procedures simply because they can – either as a means to keep busy or because it serves their own self-interest. Lean methodologies are all about identifying and eliminating this waste.

I was thinking of Parkinson���s Law during a conversation with a manager the other day. He wanted to sanction an employee who is spending a lot of time on Facebook. I pointed out that a lot of our work was cyclical – we have busy times, and we have quiet times. Wasn’t it reasonable to allow the employee to use Facebook during a quiet time? The manager said that if someone runs out of work, they should ask for more, rather than doing personal stuff. A “busy” employee will always find stuff to do.

But is this a good thing? Let’s imagine two employees, Bob and Sue. Bob is considered idle and will do the minimal amount of work required. When he’s not working, he will spend his days on Facebook. Sue is conscientious. As soon as she finishes a task, she will try and find something else to do. She is always busy.

So what’s the problem? When the manager asks Bob to do something, he will do it right away, as he has no other work on. It’s easy for him to come off Facebook, do the task, and then return to Facebook as soon as it’s finished. Sue on the hand, struggles to complete the task because she has created so many other tasks and procedures for herself that she now believes are critical to the business. She complains she doesn’t have the time for any extra work, immune to the fact that most of what she does adds little or no value to the business.

Most organisations will promote Sue and sack Bob. They value Sue, not because she actually adds anything valuable to the business, but because she is always busy. They despise Bob, not because he isn’t adding anything valuable to the business, but because he appears idle.

I have friend who is a Sales Rep for a well-known pharmaceutical company. He regularly comes out top for the company’s sales. He’s a phenomenal salesman. And he only works around three hours a day. His company probably knows this, and chooses to ignore the fact, because he’s making them so much money. If he worked six hours a day would he make them even more money? Possibly, but it’s not obvious that he would. Selling drugs to doctors can be a stressful environment requiring a great deal of skill. If he worked longer hours, would the quality of his work go down? It might. Sportsmen don’t generally work 40 hours a week. Soccer players normally only train in the mornings, and play golf in the afternoons. If they worked longer hours, would they become better players? Probably not. The key is that when they are training, their training is extremely intense and focussed. Could my salesman friend be operating in a similar fashion to a top sportsman? Is he lean and focussed?

When Bob is on Facebook, is he just being idle? Or is he resting, waiting to jump into action as soon as something important comes along? Is he “lean” and is Sue “wasteful”?
As an IT guy, I like to compare humans to computers. A server does exactly what you tell it to, and absolutely nothing more. It doesn’t “ask for work”, like my manager wants Bob to do. And it spends a lot of time idle. It is idle by design. If it reaches just 75% of its capacity I get an e-mail telling me something is wrong. No-one would ever expect to run their servers at 100% capacity. No-one wants to run them at just 50% capacity. We want them to be idle most of the time, so that we know they will be able to handle any unexpected events or tasks that we require them to do. Should we treat employees the same way?
In the workforce, idle employees are often fired. Everyone pushes for productivity to go up to as close to 100% as possible. What happens then is a couple of employees go off sick, or on holiday, and the company can’t cope. Unlike with servers, there is no redundancy built in.

Of course, whilst companies push for 100% efficiency, they don’t get it, because no-one works at 100% all the time. This is where IT salesmen selling things like SANs fall down. They assume a company is at 100%, so any server downtime is a disaster. They present graphs like the following:

On the X axis we have time, on the Y axis we have efficiency. People are working at 100% efficiency when the server goes down. They immediately drop to 0% until the server is fixed, and they return to 100%. This is represented by the big dip on the graph. So for every second that the server is down, the company is losing money. That lost money is used to justify buying a couple of SANs to mitigate any server failure.
But I suspect the reality is more like the graph below. This looks more like a performance monitor for a server.

We see that people are working at around 70%. Busy, but not too busy. When the server fails, their productivity drops. But it doesn’t drop to zero, because people always have other work they can be doing – like sorting out their filing cabinets. When the server comes back, their productivity his 100% for a while, they are really, really busy catching up on work. But once they’ve caught up, they can relax and return to their normal 70%.
We currently have a desire to be a “Lean Company”. We want to use lean methodologies to increase productivity. I say productivity, but that may not be the right word. Not in the traditional sense. If you’ve studied Goldratt’s Theory of Constraints, you’ll know that you can lower productivity, increase throughput, and make more money. The same with Lean theories – a company can become super-efficient at creating waste. It’s about doing productive activities that add value, and eliminating activities that create waste. One thing that has disappointed me with the literature I’ve read on Lean and Theory of Constraints, is that they don’t generally cover the human aspects of work. They don’t allow for the physiological difference between Bob and Sue, and how they have different work motivations and incentives that may affect how effectively a lean working environment succeeds. I’m interesting in behavioural economics and how studies in behavioural economics can influence lean methodologies. Books do talk about how lean is a lot to do with changing the culture of an organisation and how employees must buy-in to the theory for it to work, but they never go into specifics. That’s what I’m trying to get my head around at the moment.

Still with me or have I sent you all to sleep?

@scottalanmiller said:

they would be the place to go to get recipes for wedding cakes.

CakeCop - the only bakery to be officially endorsed by leading law enforcement agencies

The police should have some expertise in IT giving the continuing rise of cyber crime. Ignorance isn't really an excuse. I mean I'd expect them to know something about drugs, even though they don't actually manufacture, distribute or consume drugs themselves (at least not officially). Regardless, the issue here is them claiming to know something when they clearly don't. I'd have the same objection if they started giving out wedding cake recipes and poisoning everyone.