GMGruman - Slashdot User

'IT, Keep Your Hands Off My Cloud Storage!'-> 0

Submitted by

GMGruman

on Saturday February 18, @11:21AM

GMGruman writes "Too many IT organizations try to block information workers from accessing the information they work with when not at their desk in the office. The reason cited is usually security, but it turns out that such ham-handed control actually creates big security risks, as the example of one organization's backfiring policies cited here shows. There's got to be a better way than working in a police state, or of having all corporate secrets exposed to the world. It turns out there is, and ironically it's the technology, cloud storage, that users have been trying to use all along that IT is blocking."
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ABC's Nightline goes behind scenes at Apple's Chinese factories-> 0

Submitted by alphadogg on Saturday February 18, @11:07AM

alphadogg writes "ABC's "Nightline" news show on Feb. 21 will air exclusive footage from inside Apple's controversial Chinese factories that crank out iPhones and other products. ABC says that anchor Bill Weir has been given exclusive access to Apple factories in Shenzhen “to see firsthand what life is like for factory workers, most of whom have never used an iPod, iPhone or Apple computer.” Weir's report airs at 11:35 p.m. ET on Tuesday."
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The End of the PC, Courtesy of Microsoft-> 0

Submitted by

GMGruman

on Wednesday February 15, @11:31AM

GMGruman writes "It may have been Apple's iPad that gave the traditional PC its first real challenge and pointed the way to a "post-PC" future, but it appears that Microsoft is going to be the company that shifts the broad market to that post-PC era. Ironic, considering that a little more than a year ago, Microsoft's Ray Ozzie left the company with a public warning it was not on the right road to the future. Now, Microsoft is poised to release its Metro version of Windows 8 on ARM tablets that run Office and Internet Explorer — and nothing else from the "legacy" PC. For most users, that's all they need, and the so-called "WOA" tablets will join the iPad in turning today's PC's into workstations used by just a few. The rest of us in the coming years will be using whatever we call the iPad- and WOA-inspired post-PCs."
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Damning Release of Heartland Institute Documents Reveals Opposition to Science-> 0

Submitted by

bheerssen

on Wednesday February 15, @09:58AM

bheerssen writes "The Heartland Institute — a self-described "think tank" that actually serves in part as a way for climate change denialism to get funded — has a potentially embarrassing situation on their hands. Someone going by the handle "Heartland Insider" has anonymously released quite a few of what are claimed to be internal documents from Heartland, revealing the Institute’s strategies, funds, and much more."
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How Consumerization Can Actually Help IT-> 0

Submitted by

GMGruman

on Friday February 10, @03:25PM

GMGruman writes "The notion of employees using their own devices, apps, and technologies scares a lot of people in IT, who see it as at best a much harder problem to deal with than their already-complex internal systems. But IT folks should relax. There are apps for that! More important, as some IT folks have found, the consumerization phenomenon can help IT get what it wants, as users start to hit compatibility issues that It has long wanted to address but couldn't get the business to pay for because it seemed unrelated to business value. But as soon as business folks get an iPad and finally experience the issue directly, the money often magically is approved."
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The Dark Side of Apple's Mobile Dominance-> 0

Submitted by

GMGruman

on Wednesday February 08, @10:09AM

GMGruman writes "Although it sold just 9 percent of mobile phones globally last quarter, Apple made 75 percent of all the mobile phone profits. Android sales stalled, allowing the iPhone 4S to outsell all Android phone sales in the same period. And each iPhone sale costs the carriers more due to higher iPhone subsidies, hurting their bottom lines. It's a nightmare scenario for many not he mobile industry: Apple is sucking the money out of the market, much as we saw with iTunes and iPods. Apple's success is due to its own innovations, as well as to the continual stumbles of others, but the result is nonetheless a discomforting dominance by a company users love but that has a dark side tendency to control and obstinance. The joke "It's Steve Jobs' world and we just live in it" may not turn out to be so funny."
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140,000 pcAnywhere PCs still on the Net—and -> 0

Submitted by

GMGruman

on Tuesday January 31, @10:44AM

GMGruman writes "When Symantec acknowledged that Anonymous had stolen the source code for its pcAnywhere remote access software, it also told users to upgrade to prevent those pCs from being hacked. But a scan of the Internet over the weekend shows that 140,000 PCs running the at-risk pcAnywhere version are still connected to the Internet, making them sitting ducks for hackers. Robert Lemos explains why they're vulnerable and why many may have been forgotten by the companies that set them up."
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After devouring Unix, Linux is eating into Windows-> 0

Submitted by

GMGruman

on Sunday January 22, @05:53PM

GMGruman writes "A decade ago, Linux wasn't taken that seriously, yet today it's all but eliminated Unix in server environments, save for the highest-end ones. As Savio Rodrigues points out from a recent survey, Linux is also steadily nibbling away at Windows, a trend he suggests will only accelerate. But Rodrigues also notes that Linux faces an surprising drag on that growth: business managers who still see it as a minor OS for fringe uses — despite its common adoption in business IT."
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How the US Lost Out on iPhone Work 0

Submitted by

Hugh Pickens writes

on Saturday January 21, @02:53PM

Hugh Pickens writes writes "Not long ago, Apple boasted that its products were made in America. Today, almost all of the 70 million iPhones, 30 million iPads and 59 million other products Apple sold last year manufactured overseas. "It isn’t just that workers are cheaper abroad," write Charles Duhig and Keith Bradsher. "Rather, Apple’s executives believe the vast scale of overseas factories as well as the flexibility, diligence and industrial skills of foreign workers have outpaced their American counterparts so much that “Made in the U.S.A.” is no longer a viable option for most Apple products." Apple executives say that going overseas, at this point, is their only option and recount the time Apple redesigned the iPhone’s screen at the last minute, forcing an assembly line overhaul. A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day. “The speed and flexibility is breathtaking,” says one Apple executive. “There’s no American plant that can match that.” Apple’s success has benefited the US economy by empowering entrepreneurs and creating jobs at companies like cellular providers and businesses shipping Apple products but ultimately, Apple executives say curing unemployment is not Apple's job. “We don’t have an obligation to solve America’s problems. Our only obligation is making the best product possible.”"

A CTO's Case against Consumerization of IT-> 0

Submitted by

GMGruman

on Saturday January 21, @12:16PM

GMGruman writes "Sean Silverman sees the increased coverage of the notion that it's OK for employees to choose and bring in their own smartphones, tablets, even software into business environments — and he doesn't like it. In this rebuttal post, he explains why the hot "consumerization of IT" trend is a bad idea, and why what users often think of IT's silly, arbitrary, controlling ways are misguided and dangerous for their businesses."
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