Posts by Andrew Badera

Wow

Thanks Doug Dumitru, I actually learned something on El Reg today.

CSS? hahahahardly

CSS is no panacea. You have to totally restructure the flow of many applications in order to present, and allow the management of, information in a way that makes sense, and doesn't totally piss off the user.

Yes, you can use CSS to optimize a layout for various clients, but once you start to deal with any real sort of volume of information, you have to start to refactor the GUI.

Hot

F-g hot. Period. As someone who's moved fairly frequently, I've wanted something like this for years.

It's an investment

The decision to support mobile for key elements of the enterprise must be driven by need. You don't throw a data-storing communications device to any rank and file. If your IT staff, sales staff, writers at a newspaper, doctors, lawyers, investigators, etc. have a real need for mobile, if mobile offers a real business benefit, then you have to be willing to invest properly to support it. You also have to expect your employees to be adults -- if they're not, why are they working for you to begin with?

Well thought out policies have to be put in place, trained for and enforced with a reasonable amount of discipline. Camera? Sure, but with a rigid policy around that -- as long as the enterprise doesn't have large amounts of visually sensitive information, R&D, manufacturing processes, whatever that are relatively easily documented by a camera.. Bluetooth? Absolutely -- why not? Especially for headset use, GPS devices for staff on the road, so on and so forth. Headsets should in fact also be provided with any phone device. Again, some policy in place here, especially concerning transfer of data from company equipment to any mobile device or accessory. SDIO? I'd love to be able to lock it down, and/or be able to use strong encryption so that any company data that leaks onto an SDIO card only does so in an encrypted form. QWERTY keyboard? Sure, why not? Especially if the employee is sending/receiving a lot of company mail and/or text. At this point, all phones should be at least GPRS-capable, if not full 3G/HSPDA. Large screens should be available to any employee who spends time on the road, or needs to manage, massage or present any amount of data.

That said, many of these data-transfer policies apply just as equally to USB drives and MP3/multimedia players that also have the ability to store large amounts of potentially sensitive information.

I'm sure other presence-management/mobile-management suites offer similar capabilities, but one feature of note from the Vista/Exchange 2007/Office 2007 luncheon Microsoft gave a few months ago that interested me was the ability to remotely wipe the data on a phone in the event of lost data. I think this sort of capability is crucial -- terminated employees, stolen devices, I can think of any number of scenarios where being able to wipe the data on an MIA mobile device provides serious CYA insurance.

Got stick

As a 28 year old American, who has owned four cars, all stick, I can assure you that manual transmission driving skills are alive and well in the US. Recently, however, dealing with a 45 minute commute down a 3 lane highway that was packed bumper-to-bumper at 6am, and would come to a complete stop in places if you were unlucky enough to still be on the road come 7am, I have given serious consideration to going over to an automatic -- at least for my daily driver.

Office suite? Smartphone?

I have yet to see the Office suite on a Smartphone ... on PocketPCs, sure -- but never on a Smartphone. What's the point of a fullblown office sweet if you don't have a keyboard or thumbboard? ClearVue is common on Smartphones, however, as it's more of a viewing product than an editing product, last I knew.

It sounds like Microsoft is really ...

... just looking to pass the buck. They want developers to say, "it's ok if your next browser doesn't work with anything I've designed for your previous browsers." They're not trying to fix, or avoid, the problem, they're simply looking to be let off the hook. They need to have the balls to just DO IT -- and take what flack comes with it. It sounds like Trident needs to be revamped from the base up, in order to come into compliancy with standards. A refreshed, standards-compliant Trident would mean it would be difficult to support OLD MSIE pages -- but this shouldn't matter. Since everyone has a FF and MSIE version these days anyways, an MSIE that is standards compliant should be able to render the existing FF versions just fine. A minimal change for developers -- simple removal of the special case.

Mainframe ... easy? Cheap?

I work at an insurance company where we are moving away from mainframe technology onto x86 server blades, using Java and .NET. I don't think anyone here would agree it's easy to do much with the mainframe -- VSAM file storage is a big feature killer -- and it's certainly not cheap to buy or maintain -- TCO is the big wallet killer.

@Peter W

Bigger head means more surface area to lose heat, and I'd suspect that the amount of heat retained by the additional hair-covered surface is NOT equitable to the amount of head LOST by the additional radiating surface.

The US isn't alone in poor education

Heard of the Vardy Foundation, now known as Emmanuel Schools? The overly religious "founder" put down a relatively small proportion of startup costs, the UK paid for, and continues to pay for, the rest, and the "founder" is allowed to set up the board, and therefore influence the curriculum, to his personal standards:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmanuel_Schools_Foundation