filepro CD - map project update

[Fairlight]

Four score and seven years--eh, screw that!  At about Thu, Dec 29, 2005 at
06:12:55AM -0500, Walter Vaughan blabbed on about:
> Fairlight wrote:
>
> > And that helps someone on a net-isolated computer...how? :)
>
> I initially thought "why even fool around with anything on the
> client". Just do a re-direct to an internet host from a CD that does
> nothing but autoruns a webpage on a remote server. For grins and giggles
> you might include some bandwidth heavy movies on the CD.
>
> Those users who are unwilling to have invested in continuous broadband
> access via all their devices are going to have to pay many times more in
> order to cover their distribution of their data costs.
>
> I dunno. What do these cheap *astards have for client devices? Win9X,
> Mac's, XP?

Well I think that's over-simplifying and over-generalising.  Granted,
broadband hasn't hit near 100% penetration yet, and won't for quite some
time.  However, I've also seen places with 100mbit fibre in the office that
can't do squat because IT has inverse firewalled their systems to enforce a
corporate policy of making their computers unusable for anything
net-related.  The connection is there for other reasons that the employees
never see, and IT and/or top-level management won't make exceptions, even
if it makes sense to do so.

An excellent example of the kind of illogic that goes on:  My wife used to
work for the state at one particular agency.  They had A/V software on all
systems.  People used to install everything under the sun off the net, as
well.  Their database was remotely accessible--hell, they were so insecure
that we could mount their shares over the net when she was working at home
and needed some resources.

So one day she's installing this multi-thousand dollar (around $5k per
copy) piece of engineering software from master floppies direct from the
vendor, and unlike the rest of the people in the office, including her
superiors, she actually virus scans the floppies.  Gee, they sent
-infected- masters out the door at the software vendor!

So what does management and IT do?  They ban -all- software that's not on
their "approved" list (making it a termination-worthy offense to install
anything not on said list), slam the shutters on the net (which needed
tightening, but not to the degree they took it on the users), etc.  It made
no sense, as the software that was in question would have been on their
appoved list if they'd had one, and was when they implemented it.  And yet
everything else was this major hazard.  And they didn't even know about it
until she told them, as nobody else ever checked the disks.

Thus runs the 'logic' of most organisations with >10 employees.  :-/

A place could spring to have an OC-128 in place, but not let their people
ever use it, even if it would benefit the company.  Which wouldn't be being
cheap, and would certainly be an investment in bandwidth--and yet still
make the PC isolated for most intents and purposes.

mark->
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