Same here regarding the Hobbit and LotR, my father read many of what are still my favorite science fiction and fantasy stories to me when I was 6.

Just a few of the many sci-fi/fantasy book series he introduced to me and my brother by reading them aloud to us were David Edding's Belgariad series, Gordon R. Dickson's Dragon Knight Series, Keith Laumer's Retief books, The Stainless Steel Rat series by Harry Harrison, The 14 core Wizard of Oz books by L. Frank Baum, and Randall Garrett's Lord Darcy series.

He also read us several mystery and non-fiction books as well, including the Sherlock Holmes books, Elizabeth Peter's Amelia Peabody series, selections from Stephen Ambrose's Pegasus Bridge, as well as various books dealing with the 'Beam Wars' of WWII, chief among them the collected written works of R. V. Jones: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._V._Jones

It may seem odd to some people to read these books to a 6-8 year old child (no one here, of course ;), but I honestly think that's really why I've been such a voracious reader even now all these years later.

For while he no longer reads aloud to me like he did when I was a child, my father and I can now trade reading recommendations as equals; in fact just recently he got me hooked on David Drake's RCN stories and I got him hooked on Timothy Zahn's Quadrail series.

Therein illustrating the reason why it's so good. ;)

Having worked I.T. infrastructure consulting at a variety of major companies, I can tell you that the flaw in enterprise models is that the companies that specialize in them usually end up banking on the fact that most corporate buying decisions are primarily based on perceived notions regarding business costs and marketing/sales people providing kickbacks to the people who make the decisions.

The only remotely technical consideration is whether or not the system meets various standards checklists, usability considerations are pretty much non-existent prior to purchasing, after purchasing when it becomes a factor management defers blame regarding the ensuing usability issues to the SysAdmins for not being able to support the devices people want to use as they're forced to spend the majority of their time wrestling with the implementation of the crap systems they're stuck with as a result of the whole sordid mess of a process.

Agreed, although I'll be curious to see Apple, Google, RIM, etc. try to cope with the rising popular business sentiment for a focus on providing better heterogeneous device management solution as time goes on, because for the most part the emphasis is still focused on either AD or device vendor specific proprietary solutions (which, to be fair, worked really well for RIM when they focused more on design and less on kissing carrier ass) rather than focusing on the BYOD direction in which the market is currently heading.

Yes, some SysAdmins do take that route, fortunately most Apple users in Enterprise environments can generally work around that by setting up community self-support with minimal issues and call in consultants such as myself if something goes really wrong.

So you're blaming Mac users for your company's failure to implement basic e-mail attachment security policies on your e-mail servers? ;)

Disagree. I've done I.T. sub-contracting at pretty much every Fortune 500 company in the SFBay area and I can't count the number of times I've ended up having to aid members of in house I.T. departments in their efforts of integrating serial modems for laptops from the early 90s into their networks because some ancient corporate officer has been using it since time immemorial and can't be bothered to be required to upgrade.

And let's not even get into the amount of hours I've spent wrestling with serial printer integration! :P

Whereas all I have to do is point out the financial costs of lost time and productivity from wrestling with configuration hassles and cleaning out malware on Windows, the savings on non per-CPU client site licenses, cost of repeated upgrades, and cost of staff training for updates.

I'd hardly describe myself as a fanboi of any technology, but I've definitely seen a slow but steady growth of Apple technologies in I.T. departments over the last decade and as this article shows, I'm clearly not alone in that observation, either: http://goo.gl/vY1lM

No, see, I think you're confusing what happens to users with what happens to I.T. staff members who try to refuse Management requests to use and support whatever device they want...

Oh I don't, but unlike management, I don't feel the need to keep them under continuous surveillance. ;)

That's funny, I used to know somebody who had a similar anecdote to yours. He worked with a major accounting firm called Anderson...

Let me offer you a personal anecdote of my own which is that one of the things I've noticed is that out of all my friends and people I've met in various industries over the years, the biggest difference between the people I know who came out of situations like this relatively unscathed (be it from Enron or something as recent as Solyndra) and those that didn't, is that the people who didn't take a hit from it were the sort of people who never really trust the people running the companies they worked at.

Only if the people you're reporting aren't corporate officers, a.k.a. the people who facilitate/actually perpetrate most major FRAUDULENT activities. :P

Nice straw man you built there, but I was actually responding to the ENRON reference in the original post by ArhcAngel by making the point that a good IT staff ensures compliance but ideally not at the expense of the major efficiency losses incurred by saddling the employees with technology that inhibits their ability to do their job.

To be clear, as somebody who has done consulting for various IT compliance regulation auditing preparations in the past, I completely understand that companies have to do it, despite the idiocy of the fact that if you try to reprimand a corporate officer that way, you're pretty much guaranteed to get canned so it really doesn't do anything except give the federal government a reason to come down on you for the stupid little things you mention while most of the time the higher level management who facilitate the major FRAUDLENT activities are guaranteed to be able to keep going until a news report comes out, the stock price tanks and the feds show up. :P

All that aside, however, what I have absolutely no patience/sympathy for are the admins who try to blame SOX and other compliance standards for not doing their primary job effectively, which is ensuring that they provide and implement the best technical solutions to meet as many of the individual needs of their fellow employees as they can as efficiently as possible.