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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.