First Job -- IT Dept. says IE 6 Only
 

So, I just started my first job...it's a government job.

My computer setup is nice, but I am forced to use Windows. It's an XP station with dual 20" monitors.

I noticed the aging IE6 was the only browser on the computer and I was pretty confused. I emailed the IT dept (about 4 weeks into the job) to see if we were allowed to install altnerate web browsers. I explained how I have been using tabbed browsing for 5 years and that using a browser without tabs is hurting my productivity. Seriously, what good are two 20" monitors if all you can have open are two IE 6 windows? I run 17 tabs in Safari daily on my 13 inch macbook screen!

Anyway, i got an email back saying you have no choice, and it is IE6 only. Well that stinks. I guess i'll have to deal with it. But, who makes these policies? The IT guy had to check with someone before he got back to me...so I don't think it's them making the policies.

Also, going back to Windows has been rough. First off, the proprietary programs they make us use are the absolute WORST things I have ever seen. Hideous, confusing, unintuitive UIs. Poor performance. Ridiculous limitations. I would expect more out of $30 shareware from an independent developer (of Mac software) than what our entire organization relies upon on a daily basis. The lack of Exposé is killing me!

Oh, quick note: Is there a way to search for mail messages in outlook? I haven't had much time to fool around with it, but I cannot find a box to type it to search for messages...it's really time consuming having to hunt down a message without Spotlight. The no system-wide search is also killing me.

I just wanted to vent a bit, I guess. And to get some advice on any possible avenues I could go with (I don't mean getting another browser to run -- that's clearly against policy -- i meant something along more bureaucratic lines of getting alternate browsers supported).

Welcome to the real world. You've spent the last 4+ years learning how to learn, with people expecting great things from you. Now, you've entered an arena where mediocrity is preferred. It will take some time getting used to it, and odds are that by the time you're in a position to correct it, you'll no longer care, or have the energy to do it if you did. :(

Sorry if that's too pessimistic. I just finished 3 days of meetings where nothing was accomplished that I couldn't have done in less than 3 hours on my own. :mad:

Hmm...you should ask them about Google Toolbar, then you could at least get some functionality back. As for IE, well...I dunno, maybe you could politely ask the guy if there is a good reason, or if it's just policy. Maybe you can talk them out of that weirdness. Or at least ask if you can have IE6 for whatever it is they need it for and Firefox for everything else.

Oh, and welcome to government work...ugh.

I hate IT managers and super big-wigs who think IE is the OMG BEST BROWSAR EVAR. Seriously, nothing gets under my skin more.

I used Firefox on my high-school network when I had my MacBook Pro. The IT tech tried to forbid me to have my MacBook on the network because I had no Anti-virus software (Uh...duh?), and because he tried to say that Open source software is prohibited from being deployed on the network.

Didn't stop me from getting a handful of teachers to install Firefox on their local computers. But seeing as this is government, you'd likely get your behind handed to you far worse than in a school for violating policy.

I'd do the usual–point out IE's security flaws. Make a case for Firefox.

I dunno why these some people still stick to the one-size-fits-all leadership. If you get trapped into one platform with no diversity, how are you supposed to be productive?

Visit a few porn sites and let your computer get really infected with viruses and spyware. Then call the help line...

My condolances, MB!
Perhaps the head of the IT dept. lives by that old saying: "It’s good enough for government work."

By the way, aside from porn, does anyone have a list of sites that are guaranteed to install spyware/malware on unprotected PCs? ;) Preferrably a really nice and challenging assortment!

By default no. There was an unofficial MS App you could add called LookOut, written by the author of Outlook. It installs without any need to update Registry, so doesn't need admin access to use. It will index all your mail, and can also index your whole HD. It supports just about every type of attachment, and also allows complicated boolean searches.

You won't find it on MS websites, because the've pulled it in favor of some beast that takes total control of your computer. Try searching public sites to see if anybody archived it.

I feel gutted for you..

I was forced to use Windows in one of my previous jobs..... and I hated using it coz I knew I wold be twice as productive on OSX...

Any chance of sneaking your Mac in and running IE6 under CrossOver?! :D

At my high school we use XP with IE6 as well, but there is only 1 monitor per workstation, so you're actually doing better. As comic book guy (from the Simpsons) would say: "Worst. Browser. Ever!"

Why don't you try to sneak in a Live CD (or a bootable flash card with Linux), it comes with Firefox and it recognizes ethernet internet connections itself, so you could boot into Linux via the Live CD/flash card for your internet work. Maybe you'll be able to find a Linux program that does the same as the one you're supposed to use.

You could list all of windows anti-productive 'features' and the Mac's pro-productive features and email them to the admin to see if they'll sway him/her

I think cwtnospam understates it MB. It should be "mediocrity is demanded." Remember the first commandment of the bureaucrat: "This above all: protect thine ass!" When that is factored into the equation of every decision, then first, all responsibility for any action must be carefully diffused - no individual will ever make a decision by him/herself; and second, it's always safer to do nothing than to take ANY initiative. Initiatives are dangerous....

I sincerely hope that's not so, MB

As a consulting Engineer some years ago now, I took on a job involving vehicle control for the US Army. That was sufficient to convince me that I would never, ever, do another consult for any government at any level; and in the subsequent 25 years of my practice I never did.

I am so, so spoiled. I have never had to use an employer-supplied computer at my job. Ever. Always bring in my own. (Which is always a Mac, and furthermore I always use MY choice of software for the important stuff). It's a condition of employment.

I'm glad I'm not you.

Maybe you could just remove the entire hard disk and insert one that you supply? (You'd have to run a non Mac OS but it doesn't have to be Windows) Can you backwards-engineer the network and account settings so you have access to the domain?

While a good idea, I'm sure the partisan hacks up in the IT department have ways of telling who is running what OS. I know that's how it was in my high school.

Would running FireFox Portable from USB thumb-drive possibly work?

It's called LAZINESS! Typical, government attitude. Ugh, it frosted me just to read the post.

It's not just the government.

Not too long ago my wife, who works (with Windows) for a large company, was, as she puts it, "searching the database for ways to be more productive" something she does daily, and "found a new icon for reporting billing errors." So, she found an application for reporting a specific problem to the appropriate department for resolution, which she thought was great because up until then the reporting method was to ask that department to email a referral (and hope they responded), fill out the form, and return it.

Unsurprisingly, she regularly complains about ridiculous and byzantine systems that guarantee inefficiency.

Well, a couple of weeks later, a supervisor called her over and yelled at her because a customer with whom she spoke called back because of a billing problem which went unreported - therefore unresolved. So my wife explained that she had indeed reported the problem using the new system as well as telling a manager about it (the problem, not the new system, which she assumed everybody knew about), which is all she can do.

She was told there was no new system. It turned out she was the only person in a very large building who knew it existed. Obviously the other department didn't even know to look for these reports.

So she had the supervisor and a manager come to her computer to see it for themselves. The managers thought the new system was a very good idea, but unsure about whether it should be implemented, they decided to have a meeting to decide if they should stick with the old system, and during that meeting they would decide whether to ask the higher ups about the new system. Meanwhile, she was asked to re-report using the old system.

Yes, the company paid for software to replace an inefficient process and failed to tell the employees that it had been installed. When made aware of it by my wife, her managers asked her to stop using it, asked her not to tell anybody about it, and held meeting to decide about making a decision.

She is still using the new system. Sometimes she goes over the managers' heads.

Her pet peeve, though, is that trouble tickets must be emailed from the affected computer.

But said computer might be dead, and logging into the system from a different workstation is impossible - user passwords are machine specific, and logging into a different computer using someone else's password can get you walked out the door.

She once had a coworker send a trouble ticket for her. When the tech showed up, he refused to fix her computer because the trouble ticket originated from a different one. He actually turned around and left.

Can't really blame him, though - he has rules to follow, too.

Now, when she has a computer problem, she lets management deal with it while she cleans her desk or something. And when (I say when because it will happen) a supervisor tells her to log into a different computer and work under a different employee's account, she refuses and reminds them that asking her to violate code of conduct rules is itself a code of conduct violation that will be reported if repeated.

Her computer gets fixed faster now. She is one of the department's top performers, so the longer she is offline, the worse her managers look.

It's not really laziness IMHO. It's a complete inability to act independently or to take any risk whatsoever. They'll endure IE6 and its weaknesses because they probably have ActiveX crap running on their internal sites, because they have probably evolved a cobbled-together firewall that they might have to change, because they wouldn't need nearly so many IT guys if they used a decent system, because there is no incentive whatever to change anything -- it certainly won't reflect on their careers or pay, and because their bosses haven't got a clue being old guys for the most part with civil service tenure who've never bothered to look at anything else.

As mentioned above, it happens in the corporate world too. Those meetings I was in earlier this week: lead by a guy who was proud of the fact that he didn't know anything about technology. I had to hold back a groan as he tried to quit out of Powerpoint by clicking on the close box for the Windows Security Center window that had popped up.

I could give you a few reasons why.

1) You are in a windows environment and it comes bundled with windows. They don't want to support multiple browsers because it makes it harder to support so they chose to support only 1 browser. Since IE is installed by default, it wins by default.

2) You have to, or a decent percentage of people have to work in active x environments, which means you have to use IE. I hate active X but that is how it works.

3) You must realize that corporate computers are bought, configured, and deployed by the masses. They don't have time to load or to install other third party browsers, or applications. What you get is what you get because it works, and most IT people have bigger and better responsibilities over what browser a user uses.

4) IE, granted it does suck, is one of the most compatible browsers out there.

At my work our default browser on all the windows boxes is IE. If a user wants to install firefox they can, but we don't support it if it doesn't work with any of our web based systems. So if it doesn't work you gotta figure out on your own how to make it work or go back to IE to use that one specific site.

I am not saying I totally agree with all the reasons I listed, but that is why it is implemented. You have to realize that dealing with enterprise level networks there are so many more things that are of higher concern than what web browser is in use.

Heh, if there really were more pressing concerns they wouldn't worry about locking you into one browser! I suppose we could blame the need to lock everything down on the enormous security risks you take when installing a Windows box on any network. :D

I had the same situation in my school. I had some dude who was PROUD of the fact that he was a total microsoft-whore (Excuse my terminology), and proud of the fact that his website was literally broken in anything BUT IE6 because he made it in FrontPage, and was totally proud of the fact that his PowerPoint presentations looked like crap. the school is ALL Microsoft-based, so I refused to use ANY of their computers, always opting to bring my MacBook Pro in for any work that needed doing. And this guy would always try to push me to the Microsoft side.

"TextEdit isn't good enough, it's formatting is incorrect. Use Word."
"You need Windows to run this program, it's not Mac compatible."
"You need DOS to tel-net to the router."

Every time I was able to get the work done on my Mac, with twice the productivity. TextEdit doesn't have the bloat of Word or the vulnerabilities, I can use CrossOver if I need to run a Windows app, and I can use the Terminal to telnet to the router I was working on in my project. Even worse, I failed a project because he needed me to rewrite a web form in FrontPage, and he specificially stated it HAD to be in FrontPage, nothing else.

I flat-out refused to do it. He re-assigned the project to some poor soul who would do it, and told me that in "Corporate America we use Microsoft Software."

I'm in school. I DON'T GIVE TWO CRAPS ABOUT WHAT CORPORATE AMERICA USES!

And for this reason, the entire school will be upgrading to Vista this year. The IT guy groaned because Vista, as we all know, constantly calls home to validate itself, and all the computers will have to do said validation. But he couldn't exclude the Mac from it, claiming that Leopard would have the same technology. I fired back saying "I'm in the ADC, and I know that Leopard does not have this technology." (I'm leaving out the part that I have a free ADC membership for the sake of argument)

Boy, am I glad I graduated last month. :D

This goes for our Macs as well which we also lock down and do not let end users install software, because it is a work machine not a toy. In fact the Macs are more locked down than the PCs, we let end users of the PCs install software, but on the Macs we do not, because we don't want anyone but the IT staff having administrative access. There is a HUGE security risk of giving anyone admin level privileges on OS X.

Point in being is that it is a work computer, and they will always have a system of control not matter what platform you run (Linux, Windows, OS X) in the enterprise level. There are so many reasons I will not list them all.

Now that is pure ignorance.

And how do you keep users from dropping apps into ~/applications or their desktop? Admin access isn't and shouldn't necessary to install most software. It's the Windows security nightmare that has most IT staff wrongly looking at users as the source of the problem. The fact is that if the user can be the problem, you've got a sloppy operating system.

I'll just put down one.

For every one person that can be more productive with different software or who can troubleshoot an issue with unsupported software there are at least 20 users who can not support themselves and don't follow the simple rules set up to protect them (save all work to the large amount of space set up just for you on the server that is backed up every night) in case of a problem that will keep you from your computer.

I also wanted to add that after the first 6 months on my job I finally did get Firefox and Thunderbird added to the images we deploy.

And for every user that cannot support themselves there is no need to install more software, only a need to find a competent replacement. This is the twenty first century. If you can't use a variety of software, you're either using very bad software or you should be digging ditches.

The minute the app needs a root level resource it will prompt for the password, adobe acrobat professional is the bane of my existence when it comes to this because of the self heal function.

Also when you have 1000s of computers and have users installing all sorts of software and user A wants what user B installed and can't figure out why it won't work properly it makes it a support nightmare. Users then call the help desk for unsupported software and create more work for everyone else. In my department there are about 15 or so people that run the network and support around a total of 30,000 users with about 10,000 computers on our network. That is not counting servers and network printers either. So, you can clearly see how some sort of system of control needs to be implemented so we can do our jobs. Plus I don't want any user to have the ability to sudo, that is just asking for problems. I already have to deal with users who can't properly back up their data to a network share, or have problems deleting the wrong file off the network share. Then I have to salvage the data.

Web browsers for us, is not a big deal. We let users run camino and firefox, other software can be a huge deal, and can lead down the road of being a support nightmare.

I personally would never give a user admin rights in my current work environment, because not everyone is trust worthy. In a different work environment where people actually work on their computers and don't play games all day or myspace all day then, yes it could be a very different world. Then again I don't know if any work place is like that. I have given "trusted" users over the years admin rights and have them swear to me they won't mess anything up or give out the password. They always give out the password. So, I learned my lesson the hard way and don't give that information out any more to anyone. Unless my bosses have given permission otherwise.

We had an ecomm server that was run by a web development teacher that had a hardware failure and the OS had some issues because of it. I replaced the system board in the server (HP Proliant series) and had server OS issues with it. Since it was their server technically we weren't supporting it, but when they couldn't get it to work it fell back on our hands. This is something we had nothing to do with so we had no idea how it was set up or what all services were running or who all was accessing it. It was a support nightmare to go through all of that and get it back up and running. If it was ours to begin with we would have known what to do because we would have been running it.

I hope you see my points on why things are the way they are sometimes but at the same time I think that a web browser for the most part should be a moot thing on a computer. Some people are just stuck in their ways, and when they are in charge thats what happens.

Oh and to answer your question, IT departments do not set policies, Management does. Welcome to the Government! What applications are you using for your work, things like AS/400 and other terminal based applications that do have really crappy UIs?

It's not so much the applications as the crappy UI built into Windows and the way it allows software developers to create sloppy applications. It makes me cranky when I have to deal with it, and I've had to much more than I'd like over the last week or so.

Woa! How did I miss this bomb??? :eek:
IE is NOT compatible with anything. It is deliberately incompatible because MS is attempting to leverage it and their OS dominance into other markets.

Yes, there are sites that require IE, but that is light years away from being compatible!

MBHockey... can of worms.... now opened!

IE works with every site I go to, FF, Camino, and safari don't. It is the most compatible simply because of Active X driven web based front ends to data bases. I never said I liked it, I am stating a fact.

I personally hate IE, and don't use it unless I have to and firefox is not compatible.

Like I said, that has nothing to do with compatibility. If IE were compatible, there wouldn't be any site that required it. If it were compatible, that would mean that it adhered to web standards so that any site developed for IE would work with any browser that adhered to those same standards. What you're saying is the proof that IE is NOT compatible.

You always have to argue semantics, look at it from management POV

So IE works with everything out there on the net? Okay we will use it?

Do the webkit browsers work with everything? NO, okay, then we won't.

Active X is crap, and i hate it, and it is a good way to get your machine exploited, but the FACT is IE works with everything, therefore it is the most compatible browser out there. No matter how you dress the argument I am right. I am not defending it because I like it, I hate active x and IE with a passion, but I am telling you that is just how it is.

End of discussion.

I hope I did not give the impression that I meant only government, because you are absolutely right. In fact, for a while there we were home schooling our kid via Net. And guess what? IE only. And not just IE, but IE on WINDOWS only. And they were even willing to send me a free PC. I declined and began to accuse their team of--yes, laziness. I got a flamethrower response for calling their staff lazy. I look at it from the POV of my company. Imagine a global company not taking the time or care to satisfy the major browsers out there. Will our customers be happy, or irritated? What would be the impression we would be setting forth? Certainly not a care or concern for our customer base. Governments and bureaucracies do not care about customers. They only care about their systems and how they do things. That is why I have always pushed for privatization of these lamebrain ways of doing things. My big pet peeve is with the DMV! Here in California, the inefficiency is ridiculous. And who pays for the inefficiency? Certainly not the employees with their benefits up the wazoo.

Those who have an IE-only attitude do not care for their customers. In fact, Windows software itself came in my face today. I was trying to find the doctor that my wife was taking my kid.

Me: Excuse me, I'm trying to find which doctor my son is with right now.
Receptionist: What is your last name?
I gave the last name and spelled it out.
Receptionist: What is the child's name?
I gave the first name.
Receptionist: His date of birth?
Me: What?
Receptionist: His date of birth?
Me: Can't you do a search using the name?
Receptionist: I'm trying to help you.
Me: This is Windows-based software, isn't it? (I didn't need to ask)

It wasn't a pretty dialog. It ended up not being the right office. When I found the right office, the exact same thing happened. I wanted to pull the plug on their system.

That's the kind of short sighted thinking that's getting American company's butts kicked around the world. When you don't look at the larger picture, you buy the cheapest crap and then wonder why it ends up costing you more. It's why Windows dominates the corporate market, why Walmart dominates the department store market, and why Americans are losing their standard of living.

It is not semantics. It is foolish to think that IE adheres to standards (ie, is compatible) or worse, that it is a standard. It is a proprietary piece of software that should not be allowed on the web. Because it is, we're all worse off, and that includes management.

First, working with everything implies "most compatible" if, and only if, the web designers code their websites to standards instead of to browsers. Unfortunately, most web designers go out of their way to make sure their pages render properly with IE. This is due to IE's user share, and has nothing to do with IE being compatible. As cwtnospam pointed out, if IE were compatible with standards, the sites wouldn't have to be written specifically for IE.

IE does not work with everything. Here is a page IE 7 cannot render properly because IE is not compatible with web standards, even though MS helped to define those standards. (Here is how the page should look.)

There's quite a few sources out there that show just how non-compatible with web standards IE is.

By avoiding standards compliance/compatibility, MS effects a Nash equilibrium in web design strategy. It is to no web developer's advantage to stop catering to IE's incompatibilities until all web developers stop catering to IE's incompatibilities. If everybody stops doing it, everybody (except maybe MS)
wins.

It doesn't work on Firefox either

I think Safari (WebKit browsers), Konquerer and Opera are the popular browsers that can render the page properly. I think FF3 is supposed to be able to pass the test when it is released. Camino will probably pass at that point, as well.

The Nash-Cournot equilibrium, and MS’ monopolistic agenda
 

That’s right on the money! (pun intended)

When my former bank, the largest in Norway, introduced Internet banking some years ago, I just couldn’t get it to work. Finally I called their customer service line and was switched through to someone in charge.

"Sorry, our solution only supports MS Internet Explorer on Windows machines."

I switched banks that same day. And I called every relevant regulatory body and sang out that "this is unacceptable!"

That’s an excellent analysis!

Microsoft did not help develop the international standard in order to comply with it. Rather they did so in order to practice their own standard, which was just deviant enough to serve their owns commercial/monopolistic agenda.

Others may master the technology, and be light years beyond Microsoft in terms of solutions and products. But for decades, no one has mastered the game better than Microsoft.

And they’re still immensely successful at it!

Unfortunately.


-- ArcticStones



PS. Remember that poignant scene in "Pirates of Silicon Valley"? Steve Jobs is droning on and on about his and Apple’s superiority: "We're better than you are. We have better stuff"

Bill Gates shakes his head in disbelief:

"You don't get it, Steve. That doesn't matter."
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An added thought on Microsoft’s monopolistic practices:

Whereas American antitrust authorities, led by a new political regime, backed off just when they were about to finally achieve results, the European Union is making demands that are very much upsetting Microsoft’s game plan.

I for one applaud those efforts!

I hate to stray from the current line of conversation including politics, MS, IE, FF etc.... but I'd like to add that I've started working at an academy and EVERYONE uses Macs.

The whole business, the whole institution are now all running macs. The office staff (50-60 people) all have new iMacs in their offices and the Upper Management (22 people) all have Macbook Pro's. Plus all the student machines are all imacs (and a few emacs lying around still) which comprises of another 35 or so machines.

The building is now running about 120 or so Macs and our I.T staff member (we have ONE I.T Guy) is only part time, as he tells me that the system runs almost too well, theres not much for him to do sometimes.

I love this place, plus (attn: tlarkin) I have admin rights to my work computer as do everyone else with theirs, my job would be near impossible without admin privileges.

I just thought this bears repeating.

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I noticed that too.
What are they trying to do? Create unemployment!? :eek:

I think that's the paradox of IT. If you do your job well, you go unnoticed because you've installed equipment that needs very little maintenance and users can do everything they need with very little help. If you don't do your job well, then you've installed Windows. :D

I call this the MBA revolution -- which has poisoned the American (and Canadian) way of life -- go for the bottom line; forget everything else -- go for the bottom line -- don't ever take the long term point of view -- go for the immediate bottom line whether it's in dollars or votes in the next election, that's all that counts.

I didn't say that is not possible, I said in my current work environment I wouldn't give anyone access. We have in the past, and it caused us more work because people didn't know what they were doing and would try to fix things themselves. If I worked for a small design firm, or you know had less than 30,000 users to deal with, then sure I could see giving some people admin rights.

I see what you mean. Like I said, it's about 120 Macs and only 13-15 of us have full admin rights. If I were to deal with 30,000 users, I wouldn't know even where to start...

It's our instant gratification society that is the problem, IMO.

But where does that come from? I think that in any society, everything of any significance comes from leadership. In this country, leadership comes from big business. Somewhere along the line, large corporations gave up the idea of corporate civic duty and decided that their only responsibility was to their shareholders. Shares are bought on the stock market, which fluctuates minute by minute based on rumor, conjecture, and occasionally facts. Almost everything about the market encourages short term thinking. Just look at what happened to Apple stock on a rumor (later shown to be false) that orders for iPhone parts had been reduced.

I doubt that most of the people in a small design firm need admin rights on a regular basis either, but that's on a Mac, where a standard user account lets them do almost everything they might need, including install software into ~/Applications, their desktop, or somewhere else besides /Applications without presenting a significant risk. Once again it comes down to the OS and not the user.

Why is that? IMHO, because big business is really the driver of our economies and the source of our incomes and whatever wealth we have (which includes not just investments, but standard of living). Governments, on the other hand, diminish wealth by taxing us and are rarely perceived as adding much to the quality of life, and there has been an overwhelming tendency here in the US and Canada for our governments to "big brother" us entirely too often.

And, of course, the same applies to politics and politicians -- they live for the next election, and big business plays on that fact.

The instant gratification motif pervades our lives. We carry cell phones so we can be in touch with anyone at our instant whim. We seek out WiFi hot spots and carry laptops so we can stay "connected". We don't save. Unions protect their member's income and perks even as an industry they work for goes down the tube. The captains of industry receive huge bonuses as their corporations income slides and get golden handshakes when their cronies on the boards have finally had enough.

And the "big brother" schtick: as a guy named Kee Hinkley said rather well, I thought: We live in a society where safety is valued way above fun. The nervous idiot geeks in stupid clothing have taken over. The armies of lawyers and civil servants and insurance companies, pale, white, sickly people who had to be coddled as children and are always scared, are succeeding in turning our world into a sterile padded cell of barriers and safety warnings and stupid rules because they perceive danger as bad. I'm not sure which upsets me more: that these people are so unwilling to accept responsibility for their own actions, or that they are so eager to regulate everyone else's.

Actually, it's small business that drives our economies, but they don't have the political power or the political ambitions. Big businesses have the power, and even see themselves as not needing government until they run into trouble in a foreign country, or they need more infrastructure such as bridges, roads, airports, etc., to increase profits. Why else would we have troops in the Middle East, but not Darfur, where no large corporation has significant money at stake?

well to be fair not all of our 30,000 users use Macs, but a lot of people do. I don't really care about applications be installed as long as it is open source or somebody has purchased a license somewhere. What I care about is giving someone the power of sudo.

Out of 30,000 users, how many even know what sudo is, let alone how/when to use it?

Some users know how to use google, and knowing how to use it doesn't matter. Trying to use it and messing up is the problem, and it has happened before in the past which is why we don't give out admin rights to anyone.

I think Larkin's attitude (with which I agree) is right on.

At one point we did give certain people admin rights, and they of course then in turn gave it to everyone else. We were getting support calls all the time for people trying to fix any problem they happen to come across and it made it worse. One extreme case was we had someone who didn't know what they were doing erase everything on a network volume because of Unix permissions and lack of ACL support in previous versions of OS X.

If we lived in a perfect world then I wouldn't have a job. Computers would run on their own, and people would respect them as company property.

I have heard so many times user's tell me they could have fixed the problem themselves if I had given them rights to do so. It is annoying to hear this all the time. I don't go around and tell anyone how to do their job, nor do I try to do anyone else's job.

I guess if you are going to work on the enterprise level expect these things to happen. Just stop and think about it. You are trying to manage 1000s of users on one large enterprise level network. You have enough problems just keeping it up and running, NAT, firewall, spam filters, email servers, file servers, DHCP servers, routers, switches, software deployment, network based applications, back up solutions, Directory services, all the way down to the end user's computer. There is logic in behind locking everything down, to make it easier to support. Remember these are work machines, not personal computers, not play toys. Our eDirectory holds about 30,000 users, 6,000 are employees and the rest are students. My department is maybe 15 people total, some are network techs and others are network support. We support I think its almost 60 buildings now, over three cities. We have a lot on our hands and making a system of control (regardless if its windows, OS X, or Linux) is a must to make our jobs possible and to ensure the end user gets to use their technology as intended.

Maybe you don't, but this thread exists because IT has decided that they know what browser the OP needs to do his job, as well as everyone else who works there.

Well again you are wrong, the IT staff never sets policy, management does. I would say the problem is lack of end user feedback. I know at my work if enough users want something done, we look into it and if it will work then we do it. We are more of a customer service in many aspects than just an IT department.

You mean IT management does. It's a government job. Even if the decision got pushed all the way up to the President, he would just rely on what IT management told him.

It's funny in a way. Who ever has made this decision has put the government in the position of potentially violating anti-trust laws.

IMO, the underlying cause is a lack of understanding of Calculus in the general population.

At one time in our society, it wasn't terribly important to know how to read and write. We communicated primarily through speech, and were largely self sufficient. As technology advanced, we realized that written language was a valuable tool. Thus, we recognized the need for literacy. The ability to read and write gave individuals the ability to communicate across gaps in time and/or space. This increased the exposure to information for most any literate person.

We also realized the need for basic Math skills. The ability to add, subtract, multiply and divide was invaluable for family and business finances.

From these needs were born the "3 Rs," Reading, wRiting and aRithmetic. As a society, we felt these were fundamental skills necessary to be a productive member of society. They are simply not enough any longer. What good is language literacy without a functional level of computer literacy? Does the ability to read help or hinder without accompanying critical thinking skills? Can we budget effectively if we don't have the tools to understand how today's choices will effect us in the future?

If we think of Algebra as a still camera, then Calculus would be a video camera. The former can offer information about a particular instant. The latter allows us to use that information to help learn more about past instances and future instances. It allows us to better understand the implications of change.

Calculus is the mathematics of change. It allows us to put the present into the context of not only the past, but also the future. It is a skill that is becoming increasingly valuable to the average person, since it allows us to see the bigger picture in a systematic manner.

I think those that do not understand Calculus will be at a similar disadvantage this century as those who could not read or write in the last century. We are doing our kids a disservice by graduating them from secondary school (or worse, university) without such skills.

Absolutely! Without at least a basic understanding of Calculus, it's impossible to think about the long term implications of anything, including settling on a deliberately incompatible browser like IE for any large institution.

Often this is untrue. In some cases (not all that rare) government taxes allow citizens to receive benefits at a lower cost than they could obtain as individuals purchasing from private companies.

The US' healthcare system is a great example. We pay the world's highest price for private care, but the quality of service is surpassed by many other countries that provide such services through tax revenue.

I, for one, would hate to have to rely on privately controlled roads for my ground transportation needs. Nor would I want to live in a society where parents had to directly foot the bill for their children's K-12 education.

It's fairly trivial to determine when products cost less when purchased by individuals and when they cost less when purchased with tax revenue. What is not so trivial is convincing Americans that a tax increase can contribute significantly to a standard of living increase. Just because there is not a simultaneous exchange of money for goods/services does not mean that citizens don't get good value from their taxes.

Now you're back to that pesky math thing again! :D

Highly debatable, we don't have the highest quality health care in the world, in fact I believe Costa Rica is ranked higher than the USA. Our education is some of the worst too for how rich our country is.

From a government standpoint there is the budget to evaluate. I know that we take bids, and go with whatever we think is the best for our dollar. I work IT in a public school system (k-12) and know that what we decide to buy technology wise is a well thought out process that has room for growth and follows a replacement cycle. This goes for everything. Private companies also have budgets but I think it is different because I have done side/contract work for private sector companies and for the most part they took my advice regardless of the cost. Sometimes they would ask for a cheaper or easier solution but for the most part spending money was not as big of a problem as it is in the public sector.

Of course management never really comes down and asks us what we think, but sometimes they do take our advice. I went to a bunch of MS training for the vista launch and got to see vista, exchange 2007 and office 2007 and when I got back they wanted to have a brief meeting with me to see what, if any, benefits we would get from rolling out to Vista. I told them we would not really get any benefits for end users, that most of the new features benefit IT people if anything. They agreed and we are not rolling out vista any time soon - thank the gods!

What can I say? I'm a born again Pythagorean. Number is the within of all things. :-)

Which helps to explain how we've become so shortsighted that we can't manage to find a way to encourage the use of compatible browsers based on internet standards.

It doesn't have anything to do with government vs private sector though. Teachers are poorly paid in both sectors, with private schools often paying less. Combine that with apathetic parents who often defend their children's misdeeds, and it's no wonder we aren't keeping up. When I see people championing things like school vouchers I always marvel at the fact that they're never suggesting that teacher pay be increased to attract the best and brightest. Don't they believe in the free market?

Not to mention what we spend on other things, look what the war over in Iraq has cost us, and on top of that it has cost us almost 4,000 US soldiers lives. Our economy is way down and I think we could better spend our tax dollars on both health care and education to make it up to par. However when the poor get educated the rich no longer hold the power, but that is a completely different subject all together.

Also, I beg to differ, when a government facility purchases computers they usually do it in a lot of bulk all with the same configuration all to be used to play solitaire half the day.

That's probably why businesses choose Windows over Mac.

"Macs don't have built in solitare..."

That's what I said! :D The US is not near the top of that list (quality of healthcare), despite paying the most for healthcare.

Nope, they have chess instead....:rolleyes:


I'll admit when I have worked help desk I have played online games in the down time hehe.

Speaking of which, did anyone catch Magnus Carlsen’s impressive finish in the Biel Grandmaster Tournament? At 16 years old, he’s the youngest tournament winner there ever.

After leading the tournament with a full point, he lost two rounds in a row. Then he came from behind to crush Teymour Radjabov, the 9th strongest player in the world. That brought him into a playoff with Alexander Onischuk, 2006 US Chess Champion, which he won.

So the answer is to make every American taxpayer pay for it? I'm not being harsh here, but there are built-in problems with this since I am presently dealing with it right now with my kids. The problem with government "anything" is that it becomes a Buearocratic nightmare. We end up paying more money just to keep the great experiment going ad-nauseum. Currently they are looking for ways of teaching sex education to as low as kindergarten--including introduction of homosexuality. Now, to me, as a parent, this drives me to put my children in to private school. Guess what? Now I am paying $6k a year PLUS my taxes so that everyone else can send their kids to K-12.
There was once a bill to have vouchers where you could spend them where you wanted to augment the price of education. This meant the death nell for the inefficient Public School System. The bill was immediately killed, of course, and the inefficiency continues.

To bring it back to the original post. This tendency to move from an efficient system to an inefficient system always makes my blood boil--mostly because it forces me to use the inefficient system because I have no choice in the matter.

In engineering, this is a natural tendency of all systems. It is called "Entropy". According to Shannon, in the most general sense, the antithesis of entropy is information.

There are two different issues here. The first is who determines what gets taught in schools. Personally, I'd much rather have kids being taught about homosexuals than have them brainwashed into believing that Creationism is Science.

The second issue has to do with whether or not Government is less efficient than the private sector. I think that has to do with where on the corporate ladder you stand.

If you're the CEO of a large company, that system very efficiently pours millions of dollars per year into your bank account. If you're a typical working stiff, not so much. In addition to making less than 0.01% of the money that the CEO makes, you have no idea if your job will still exist next week, let alone next year or until you retire.

On the other hand, if you're a government official high on the totem pole, you're pulling in somewhere from $150,000 to perhaps as much as $400,000 per year, so it isn't quite as efficient for you. Your underlings are making a significant percentage of your salary, and they are relatively secure in their positions, so for them it is far more efficient than the private sector.

Notice that I've made no attempt to compare "productivity" here. That's because government typically fills needs that the private sector cannot. Nowhere on Earth does the private sector build and indefinitely maintain roads for example. Sure, they do on a small scale in rare cases, but only when they can't get Government to do it for them. Much of what "business" accomplishes, it could not without government's contributions. Most of the problems businesses cause (Three Mile Island, Love Canal, Enron, and many, many others ) occur when government controls are lax.

And Schneb, you're not paying taxes simply to send other kids to school. You're paying taxes so that when your kids graduate they can enter an educated society, without which their own educations would be useless.

With my wife a retired schoolteacher (K, 1, & 2 over a span of 35 years) and me a retired university prof with 35 years of teaching the results of primary and secondary education, I can say you're absolutely right. They know about sex, but can't read, can barely write an English sentence, use a calculator to do simple arithmetic, don't know the multiplication tables, have no grasp of geography and very little of history, and in spite of their abysmal ignorance, feel good about themselves; lots of unearned self-esteem.

If I didn't have 7 grandchildren, I'd offer to pay for them all to do that. Unfortunately 40+ K is outside my retirement reach.

Well, I have to ask, what are other countries doing that we are not that they have less crime, higher rates of education, better health care, and a better standard of living? How do they accomplish it, and why can't we accomplish it?

I mean I think technology actually hurts us in some ways. Things like internet message boards have kids writing in text lingo (or l33t speak - whatever you want to call it) and applications like MS word have adaptive AI features that correct your common grammar and spelling mistakes, so a lot of times people nowadays are just relying on the technology to make it right for them. Thus, they are never learning from their mistakes. I am all for technology making life easier for us, there is no doubt about that.

What encourages this type of behavior in our government facilities and in our education system? I don't think there is a simple answer to that question, but I do think there is a complicated one. It probably won't even be the right answer, but that is something I think we would have to deal with to ever change.

I agree with the original poster that when we micro manage everything down to its most bare naked essentials, we lose sight of some things. Obviously being forced to use only IE version 6 is ridiculous. In fact there is only one reason I could think of why this would happen. You need to work in a legacy active X environment that is not compatible yet with IE 7. Other than that, really any web browser should suffice. I think when we try to micro manage everything from Government to Education this happens. I find it hilarious how republicans preach smaller government but practice more bureaucracy. I find it ridiculous that we live in one of the "richest" nations and we don't have free health care or free higher education. I also can't believe how poor our education system is compared to other nations.

And other people pay taxes to maintain the roads and bridges that lead to, emergency services that protect, and in some cases policies that subsidize schools that they believe teach bigotry and flawed science.

There is a simple answer: responsibility. Everyone in America knows their rights, but nobody accepts responsibility for their own actions. Once again, it's up to the leaders to show the way. Start with Golden parachutes. They have to go because they don't hold executives accountable for their failures. Next, require companies to clean up after themselves so that taxpayers don't have to foot the bill. Finally, work your way down to employees, parents and students.

After all that's done, we may have a populace educated enough to avoid booby traps like Windows and IE. ;)

I thought democracy, by definition, means that the people rule. So, in turn wouldn't that mean we need to voice our needs for change? If no one ever speaks up, what makes you think our leaders will do anything else besides line their pockets with wealth and riches?

I agree with your 100% on the idea that there needs to be accountability. It seems that in our Government no one is accountable for their actions or their mistakes.

That's because our Government is not in charge. It's run through lobbyists by large corporations, many of whom see government the same way they see their employees: an expense to be passed on to customers.

I have to concur. Furthermore, if there is a lack of high-quality public education, democracy itself is threatened. And that is the real crux of the matter.

We’ve had the same debate in Norway many a time, both with regards to education and to the public health sector.

I would replace "Government" with "North American Society". Kids knock over gravestones and get a slap on the wrist if anyone bothers to try to catch them and succeeds; they're just little kids, after all. A minister or priest diddles little kids and is simply moved to another venue; mustn't bring shame on the church. A bank teller is suspected of diddling the books and is simply fired; don't want the negative PR, after all. Teachers who are hopelessly incompetent have tenure; what can a school board do, they'll say. Parole boards and the justice system bring screams of rage from victims, but nothing changes. These are all symptoms of a society gone as soft as baby poop, and so self-centered that they won't bother with anything that doesn't directly effect them.

You are describing what happens to rich white kids. I hate to say it, but we do live in segregation still, and our police are racially biased. I can say that from witnessing what happens and what goes on in a place of class diversity where I live. In a small 5 mile stretch right where I live you have upper class on one end, to poor homeless people on the other end.

If it is a black (or other non white ethnicity) kid from the city, he gets prosecuted. I have been caught drinking in public numerous times in the city and never got anything more than a warning. My old roommate who was black would have his car get searched if he was caught drinking at a public park.

People should be held accountable for all their actions. Especially those in power.

But how do you come down on small infractions when the really big criminals continue to prosper?

Ah, 5 pages?! I didn't get any thread updates in my email.

I'll have to read through this tonight..

Yes, American taxpayers should pay for it. Who else is going to pay for America's education? Should we penalize children born into poverty that can't afford a private education? How would that benefit America? You don't pay taxes to benefit you. You pay taxes to benefit America (or your state or local government). Even the poor folks.

If parents don't like the public school curriculum, they should, and have a civic responsibility to, get involved. They should talk to teachers often and attend school board meetings. Furthermore, they should encourage other parents to do the same. They need to put the public back into public schools.

Bureaucracy is not exclusive to government. It's nearly everywhere you look in the private sector, as well. In the past week I have spent about two and a half hours dealing with the private management of the apartment complex in which I live, for routine paperwork and rent payment. It shouldn't have taken three minutes, total. It would have been faster to let the local DMV handle things.

I don't see anything wrong with beginning to teach kids about sex in an age appropriate manner beginning at a very early age. It helps fight predation by pedophiliacs if kids are equipped with the ability to understand that the actions of the adult are inappropriate. It also helps ensure kids have access to good information about sexual health when they need it, without having to wait for well meaning, but misguided, parents to conclude that they are finally old enough for The Talk. It's sex. It's not vulgar; it's a natural occurrence in most every sexual species.

I also don't see anything wrong with countering the sexual orientation based bigotry so prevalent in our society. Human homosexuality dates back thousands of years. It is also not at all uncommon in a great many other animal species. Yet our society has an irrational fear of homosexuality as though it is contagious. :rolleyes: Teaching kids that a particular sexual orientation in no way makes someone inferior to someone of a different orientation is simply responsible. Ignoring the bigotry of society will not make it go away.

Now, I'm the first to admit that US schools generally need overhauling. There's a lot of stuff students should know prior to graduation that they are just not learning. But, I don't believe withholding resources from the schools is the best way to improve things. The problem with vouchers is simple. Let's say it costs $10,000 per pupil to operate the public school system in (the fictitious city of) Anytown, Illinois. Let's say Sally attends Anytown Elementary. Sally's parents, upon finding out that Anytown Elementary doesn't teach ID as an alternative to the established foundations of Biology, decides to enroll Sally in a private school. Sally's parents feel that they should be able to apply that $10,000 towards private tuition.

The problem is that Anytown Elementary does not save $10,000 in expenses due to Sally's absence. They only save marginal expenses. They don't get to dock Sally's teacher's salary by 5%. They don't save money on electricity. They don't save money on classroom technology. The school bus isn't likely to alter its route much in Sally's absence. In fact, most of the cost of educating Sally for the year must be redistributed among the other students, effectively raising the cost of education per pupil at Anytown Elementary. Why should Sally's parents be entitled to more money than the school is saving from Sally's absence? The money doesn't belong to Sally's parents; the money belongs to society, the people of Anytown. It's certainly not in the Anytown community's best interest to subsidize one student's private education at the expense of several students' public education.

J Chris-

Well said bro, well said...

Finally someone else that views it like I do. Living in America is not about your personal rights, it is about everyone's right as a citizen. Instead people want everyone to believe and think like they do, or at least conform to their ideal of what society should be. Instead if everyone had the outlook of what would benefit everyone instead of themselves perhaps we wouldn't have some of the problems that we do have. Who knows for sure though, it is purely a theory.

I know when I come upon things I do not morally agree with, but at the same time think that if people do feel that way or want to do whatever, I think they should have the right to do so.

I mean our nation's view on sex for one thing is so christianly biased, and so construed. I mean look at our movie rating system. A director can release a film with the most utterly graphic violent content in it and receive an R rating. The second they add any kind of sexual content it gets bumped to NC-17. I know countless movies that are extremely violent (like Hostel for example) and got an R rating only after they dropped some of the sexual content.

Which doesn't make any sense because when the DVD is released it is still rated R, and it has all the sexual scenes that were cut from the theatrical release. I don't understand it:confused:

Why are rich people allowed to get richer? Did you know money you make from investments is not taxed as much, and it definitely is not taxed for social security. So, basically the whole social security system is the lower classes taking care of themselves in a downward spiral of spending which will be gone soon. The rich don't care because they are rich.

This thread has swayed from how IT departments can micro manage too much, to politics hahahaha.

Oh, well I am always up for a good discussion.

But it *is* about personal rights TL. The bill of rights focuses on individuals, not on the community. When I was a kid, Canada's motto was "Peace, Order, and Good Government" and we didn't have a bill of rights. The rights of the community trumped the rights of an individual. In 1982, the Canadian Parliament enacted the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and ever since, Canadian society has converged on the US version -- communities no longer have rights; it's all down (as far as the law is concerned) to individuals (which is why abortion is legal here and so is same-sex marriage, even though a large chunk of our population oppose those on moral grounds).

It's a theory that has been tested and failed many times because it is contrary to human nature.

I could argue that we don't have many individual rights and those we at one time had have been swept away. No one pays attention to the constitution, and laws are definitely not made from it. I would say we live more like in a minimum security prison these days.

What I was trying to describe was the fact that people need to let everyone pursue their happiness, and not try to base everything off a dogmatic hypocrisy on which we base our laws on. Read about the new anti-abortion law that is looking like it may be passed in Ohio? that really screws with people's rights on an individual level, and they are doing it. When I walk down the street I don't want to have to deal with the saturation of someone else's ideals being pumped into my brain. I feel that I am hammered by these very things all day every day, and that people never listen to anyone else and thus they concentrate on only themselves.

Why don't we have any muslims, buddhist, or Hindus in our Government? I mean if we do, it is news to me. You would think that in a Nation that prides itself on our freedoms we would have such a thing, since everyone would be allowed and not judged by their choice of religion.

So, my view is, not to focus on what you think is right if it takes away from someone else's rights. So, really I was trying to say it is all about the individual, I just didn't convey my message properly enough through what I posted. Communication error is also a big problem with humans. It is not about your own personal rights, it about the rights that every person has regardless of race, religion, social status, or personal opinions. That is what I am trying to say.

You're both right.

The Bill Of Rights was added to the Constitution in order to ensure the rights and authority of the whole did not come at the expense of individual rights. There is no doubt that the Founding Fathers intended for the Federal to have authority over the several states and their citizens. That was the whole problem with the Articles of Confederation; the central government was powerless.

Of course, the Founding Fathers came from all across the political spectrum. Also, not all those who contributed to the document were satisfied enough with the final draft to sign it. Some even actively opposed its ratification. The document was a giant compromise. They were hot, tired and irritable and wanted to be finished. We have to keep that in mind before we try to understand what "they" meant.

Today much of the debate revolves around positive liberty (freedom of opportunity) or negative liberty (property rights). All too often, the two are diametrically opposed. The sixteenth amendment seems to indicate positive liberty is of higher priority than negative liberty.

Actually a very similar strategy has proven to be quite effective in controlled settings.

Cooperation is almost always a better group strategy than competition.

Well I think if we all made it an issue that we all had better free education and free health care and we educated ourselves more to a point where we don't fear each other, or the government.

That's definitely a nice goal, but we have to find a path that can get us there. It isn't free to setup such systems, and nobody seems to like voting to foot the bill to improve the nation for the sake of posterity. It's not enough for it to be a good idea and the right thing to do. It has to get voted for, and you'd better believe that there will be a lobbyist or two trying to win votes in the other direction.

The "Bill of Rights" almost didn’t make it
 

.
As far as I recall my history lessons, the Bill of Rights almost didn’t make it. In fact we can thank George Mason for raising such a stink, by refusing to sign the Constitution, for those rights being made explicit.

Mason was the one who wrote a comparable bill of rights for Virginia.

I agree entirely, in principle. Unfortunately, in my jaded old age, I'm too cynical to believe that the average person is capable of that. Works in game theory, sure; but not, I think, in real life. If industries do it, it's illegal.

Winston Churchill said: "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." On another occasion, he said: "The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter"

Unfortunately a weak system of public education (examples abound) doesn't do much for the average voter's knowledge of public affairs.

J Cristopher, you are better at articulating my point of view better than I am.

It's a shame that The Golden Rule, despite being a tenet, in some form, of virtually every religion, is contrary to human nature.

Regarding the Bill of Rights, I was always taught that, while it does garauntee individual rights, it's greater purpose is to protect the rights of the minority from the tyranny of the majority. It is a reminder that with rights come responsibilities; it's the responsibility of every citizen to protect the rights of others as vigorously as they would protect their own. But then, I'm a product of public education and a public university.

Opposition to homosexuality is a personal, moral stance that is not supported by medicine or science. Everybody has a right to their religious beliefs, and if those beliefs lead you to pull your children out of public school, so be it.

But nobody has the right to impose their beliefs on others. And to support ending public education - to seek to erode the right to public education - because a storybook mentions that a child has two mommies is an extreme overreaction.

Let's be accurate. Nobody is teaching sexuality to kindergardeners. Children are not given sodomy textbooks. There are efforts to improve the quality of sex and diversity education in age appropriate ways. Nothing more.

When my 4 year old daughter asks what it means to be married, I don't explain sex to her - I just tell her that Mommy and Daddy fell in love and are best friends who want to be together all the time and have a family. The same approach works for describing gay couples, and that is what has been introduced to public schools.

Humans cooperate and humans compete. I'm not sure either one is inherent in human nature. Maybe one or both is learned. Maybe both are inherent and just reinforced by society.

If a problem is properly modeled, what works on paper will work in real life. Game Theory helps us understand when competition is a better tactic (as opposed to strategy) than cooperation, and vice versa. More importantly, it helps us understand why one is better in a given situation. I do not have to look very far outside my door to see many shortcomings of a competitive society. Competition based economy simply does not work well (by itself) in the real world. We have been offered real world lessons demonstrating this time and time again. The Great Depression is but one example.

That certainly doesn't mean competition has no place in society. It offers society's strongest opportunity and motivation to excel. But without tempering the economy with cooperation based policy, the strong quickly leave the average and weaker members of society behind, increasing the disparity of wealth. A better strategy would be to implement policy that enables and encourages the average and weaker members to improve their living standards as well, so the entire group benefits.

The paradox of democracy is that for a citizen to be a truly well informed voter requires such an investment in time that that citizen must sacrifice commitments to work or to family. In order for democracy to succeed in the modern world, we have to be able to trust those who are better informed than ourselves to make the best choices based on what is best for the whole group.

And to bring this back to the topic of the thread, I think it's obvious that when those in charge choose to require the use of the world's least compatible browser (intentionally) over all others, their judgement is not to be trusted.

This is somewhat related:

In my school, the network used to be pretty 'open' with minimal filters, people installing various programs nonstop, which led to the worst spyware and adware problems the school probably ever seen. Each student and teacher had their own account on the network. Nobody could get work done in the shared computer labs, because the kids who used to download games and other crap behind the teacher's back, which slowed the computers down to a crawl.

The IT guys got tired of it I guess, got enough money from somewhere (the small school budget?), and installed some new computer attendance system (instead of some old paper check-off system), locked down the computers well (web filter, some network policy settings, some corporate anti-virus program, and a load of other stuff).

The filter was good, blocked 99.9% of useless downloads and bad sites, and actually fixed the spyware problems (because you couldn't download programs), although some students complained about it for various reasons. The attendance system was also good, faster than the manual way of doing roll call, but some teachers also complained about it.

After everyone adjusted to the new system, the only problems I really ever hear of are broken printers and minor networking issues.

I actually talked with the IT guys. They don't have a problem with Firefox (one of them said they use it all the time), but don't like students installing programs that could potentially mess up the computers.

I perfectly understand what they are trying to do.

I understand, but I think it's like driving a nail with a sledge hammer. The fact is that the spyware only ran on Windows PCs and the antivirus software is just a drain on resources if you're using a Mac and it's just a band aid if you're using a PC. The web browser used by an individual shouldn't make a difference to the overall performance of the network.

The fact that they needed to do all of what they did tells me that they installed a bad network with bad components. Blaming the user or their setup is just a cop out.

What can I say. I highly disagree with both J Christopher and tlarkin. But to prevent the thread being locked, I will not respond.

I believe in the free market when it comes to products and services, so I am 100% against locking users into one platform, and if possible, I'm even more against it if the platform comes from Microsoft, because they do things like make IE incompatible in order to lock users into their platform.

I see Government's job as maintaining the free market, which would rapidly collapse into some form of feudalism without government. Unfortunately, Government is controlled by business interests, which is what allows IE to be locked into many government agencies.

I'd hate to see the same thing happen with education and religion, which is what vouchers would do. Funny how it's all the same problem at the core: who decides what platform gets used or what beliefs are taught, and what are their motives? Either way I think it should be done on a local level or even individually when possible (as it is/should be with browsers), not because it results in better decisions, but because it keeps the professional lobbyists from seizing control.