Click the photo to see it at full non-computer-science size.
Thanks to kokogiak for the find!
Ummmm…no.
ReadWrite’s Top 10 Tips to Make BYOD a Success in Your Enterprise
Photo by . Click to see the original.
You should read the article to get the full monty on ReadWrite’s tips, but here’s a quick summary to whet your appetite:
- Engage stakeholders in discovery. If the people at your organization don’t support the process, your BYOD initiative will never happen. When we do our mobile strategy assessments, we make sure to get people from various groups involved — the C-level execs, legal, HR, IT, the “road warriors” and other groups who have a stake in a “bring Your Own Device” program.
- Think TCO, not ROI. In spite of the fact that BYOD means that employees are paying in part or completely for their devices, it doesn’t translate into immediate cost savings. The payoff comes over time as you increase productivity at little cost.
- This users, not devices. Desktop IT views their job as dealing with standardized desktop and laptop computers that just happen to have people working with them. BYOD is a people issue that just happens to involve a myriad of different mobile devices, operating systems, versions, apps and working styles, which is a different beast from traditional IT thinking.
- Create BYOD policies. Because BYOD is as much a “people issue” as it is an issue of software and hardware, you need to create “peopleware” to handle it. A good policies protect your organization and its information as well as its participants. Get your legal and HR people involved when drafting it.
- Evaluate operating systems first, then devices. Eminently sensible: it starts you with a choice of effectively four (Android, iOS, BlackBerry, Windows Phone), after which you can expand the decision tree by selecting from devices that support your chosen OS.
- Maximize commonalities. Again, this is about efficiency and reducing work you don’t have to do.
- Address compliance: Make sure that your chosen devices’ strengths and weaknesses fit your organization’s needs.
- Evaluate management and deployment tools. After choosing an OS and device suite, you should evaluate MDM software, remote wipe capabilities, secure data transmission, secure device storage and other management tools.
- Create an employee education program. ReadWrite sum up the reason why quite nicely with this line: “Employees understand their own devices and your corporate network, but they may be unaware of how to manage the union of the two”.
- Assess feedback. With changing needs, markets and mobile technologies, it make sense to treat BYOD as an ongoing process rather than a single-shot effort. Collect feedback from your employees and adjust your BYOD plan accordingly.
IT World Canada’s Four BYOD Policy No-Nos
IT World Canada says that these are “four BYOD missteps that are certain to compound your IT department’s headaches or even waylay a well-intended BYOD plan”:
- Limiting device choice. They argue that limiting choice to a specific device or model frustrates users and leaves IT constantly chasing technology as it has to regularly update their “allowed devices” list as mobile technology moves forward, often at a breakneck pace. The recommendation to specify a broad range of devices. We recommend using this rule in tandem with rule 5 from ReadWrite’s Top 10 Tips: evaluate operating systems first, then devices.
- Giving up the right to wipe devices. Securing your organizations assets and data is one of the big raisons d’etre of BYOD. Remote wipe may be the “nuclear option” of that goal, but there will come a time when it’s absolutely necessary, so don’t give away this ability! Any employee who doesn’t want to grant this right on their personal device is well within his or her rights, but s/he should either get a company device or deal without access to company email and other resources via his or her mobile device.
- Allowing employees to opt out of critical upgrades. The arguments to the previous point also apply to this one.
- Allowing opt-out of corporate data management policies. Again, the arguments to point #2 apply to this one.
Mobile Enterprise’s Surprising Stats About Mobile Security
Photo by Ed Yourdon. Click to see the original.
Among the numbers listed in their Surprising Stats About Mobile Security article, which is based on their IT Headaches survey and research from the International Association of IT Asset Managers, are:
- 55% of the respondents can access their organization’s enterprise information from any BYOD device.
- 60% of the respondents’ organizations don’t track who accesses their information remotely, nor do they track how long or even how.
- Almost 90% of respondents have a mobile device policy and process for lost, misplaced or stolen devices…
- …but just over 25% have real-time location tracking of devices
- …and 56% can remotely wipe devices of all data.
- 51% of organizations surveyed have a BYOD program.
- Of the respondents who took part in a BYOD program at work, 60% of them said that they were in the minority — they worked at places where 25% or fewer of the employees participated in the program.
- 77% of organizations surveyed allowed their employees to use corporate-provided mobile devices for personal use.
- 55% of organizations surveyed allowed the downloading of apps at the employee’s discretion without monitoring.
Perhaps buying books on programming isn’t what most people associate with Valentine’s Day, but a good deal remains a good deal! Apress are offering all their ebooks at 40% off when you use the discount code VDAY13 at checkout when you buy them directly from their site. The offer’s good until 11:59 p.m. EST (UTC -5), February 15th, 2013.
My current favourite in the Apress library is iOS 6 Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach, which works really well for the way I like to learn new programming things: a mix of tutorial and working example, which I then play around with, tweak, and experiment with. Each chapter covers a different aspect of iOS development, starting with applications and layout, moving on to table views and the new collection views, and from there, topics such as location and mapping, social networking and user data, images, camera and multimedia, and finally storing and transmitting data and Game Kit. The ebook edition normally goes for US$31.00, but the the 40% off discount, that becomes US$18.60.
In the big story is about Apple’s rumoured “iWatch”, Business Insider took notice of a Steve Jobs idea mentioned in passing:
In a meeting in his office before he died, Steven P. Jobs, Apple’s co-founder and former chief executive, told John Markoff of The New York Times that if he had more energy, he would have liked to take on Detroit with an Apple car.
This sounds like a perfect time to remind everyone about those old “If operating systems were cars” jokes.
The Classic
The original humour piece went something like this. As you can tell by the names of some of the operating systems, this one’s pretty old.
If operating systems ran your car, and you needed to go shopping:
- MS-DOS: You get in the car and try to remember where you put the keys.
- Windows: You get in the car and drive to the shops very slowly, because attached to the back of the car is a freight train.
- Macintosh System 7: You get in the car to drive to the shops and the car drives you to church.
- Unix: You get in the car and type ‘grep store’. After reaching speeds of 200 mph en route, you arrive at the barbershop.
- Windows NT: You get in the car and write a letter that says “go to the shops”. Then you get out of the car and nail the letter to the dashboard.
- Taligent/Pink: You walk to the store with Ricardo Montalban who tells you how wonderful it will be when he can fly you to the store in his LearJet.
- OS/2: After fuelling up with 6000 gallons of fuel, you get in the car and drive to the shops with a motorcycle escort and a marching band in procession. Halfway there, the car blows up, killing everyone.
- S/36 SSP: You get in the car and drive to the shops. Halfway there you run out of fuel. While walking the rest of the way, you are run over by kids with mopeds.
- AS/400: An attendant kicks you into the car and then drives you to the shops where you get to watch everyone else buying filets mignon.
The Photo Variant
The Gearshift Variant
The “Can You Get Under the Hood” Variant
The Story from Neal Stephenson’s In the Beginning was the Command Line
When the Clown Prince of Accordion met the Dark Prince of Hacker Fiction.
For the story behind this pictures, see here, here and here.
And finally, here’s an excerpt from Neal Stephenson’s In the Beginning was the Command Line. It was his 1999 essay in which he proposed that proprietary operating systems weren’t going to be profitable ventures for much longer because the space was about to be taken over by free software. Hey, it sort of came true, and it’s not as far off as Eric S. Raymond’s prediction in his essay, The Revenge of the Hackers:
Windows 2000 will be either canceled or dead on arrival. Either way it will turn into a horrendous train wreck, the worst strategic disaster in Microsoft’s history.
Near the beginning of In the Beginning, Stephenson compared the big desktop OSs of the time to cars:
- Windows 9x to station wagons
- Windows NT to off-road vehicles
- Mac OS (remember, this is pre-OS X) to European sedans
- BeOS to the Batmobile
- Linux to tanks that you could customize or get hackers to customize for you.
Here’s the part in which he tells his version of the “If operating systems were cars” joke. Enjoy!
MGBs, Tanks and Batmobiles
Around the time that Jobs, Wozniak, Gates, and Allen were dreaming up these unlikely schemes, I was a teenager living in Ames, Iowa. One of my friends’ dads had an old MGB sports car rusting away in his garage. Sometimes he would actually manage to get it running and then he would take us for a spin around the block, with a memorable look of wild youthful exhiliration on his face; to his worried passengers, he was a madman, stalling and backfiring around Ames, Iowa and eating the dust of rusty Gremlins and Pintos, but in his own mind he was Dustin Hoffman tooling across the Bay Bridge with the wind in his hair.
In retrospect, this was telling me two things about people’s relationship to technology. One was that romance and image go a long way towards shaping their opinions. If you doubt it (and if you have a lot of spare time on your hands) just ask anyone who owns a Macintosh and who, on those grounds, imagines him- or herself to be a member of an oppressed minority group.
The other, somewhat subtler point, was that interface is very important. Sure, the MGB was a lousy car in almost every way that counted: balky, unreliable, underpowered. But it was fun to drive. It was responsive. Every pebble on the road was felt in the bones, every nuance in the pavement transmitted instantly to the driver’s hands. He could listen to the engine and tell what was wrong with it. The steering responded immediately to commands from his hands. To us passengers it was a pointless exercise in going nowhere–about as interesting as peering over someone’s shoulder while he punches numbers into a spreadsheet. But to the driver it was an experience. For a short time he was extending his body and his senses into a larger realm, and doing things that he couldn’t do unassisted.
The analogy between cars and operating systems is not half bad, and so let me run with it for a moment, as a way of giving an executive summary of our situation today.
Click the photo to see it at full size.
Imagine a crossroads where four competing auto dealerships are situated. One of them (Microsoft) is much, much bigger than the others. It started out years ago selling three-speed bicycles (MS-DOS); these were not perfect, but they worked, and when they broke you could easily fix them.
There was a competing bicycle dealership next door (Apple) that one day began selling motorized vehicles–expensive but attractively styled cars with their innards hermetically sealed, so that how they worked was something of a mystery.
The big dealership responded by rushing a moped upgrade kit (the original Windows) onto the market. This was a Rube Goldberg contraption that, when bolted onto a three-speed bicycle, enabled it to keep up, just barely, with Apple-cars. The users had to wear goggles and were always picking bugs out of their teeth while Apple owners sped along in hermetically sealed comfort, sneering out the windows. But the Micro-mopeds were cheap, and easy to fix compared with the Apple-cars, and their market share waxed.
Eventually the big dealership came out with a full-fledged car: a colossal station wagon (Windows 95). It had all the aesthetic appeal of a Soviet worker housing block, it leaked oil and blew gaskets, and it was an enormous success.
A little later, they also came out with a hulking off-road vehicle intended for industrial users (Windows NT) which was no more beautiful than the station wagon, and only a little more reliable.
Since then there has been a lot of noise and shouting, but little has changed. The smaller dealership continues to sell sleek Euro-styled sedans and to spend a lot of money on advertising campaigns. They have had GOING OUT OF BUSINESS! signs taped up in their windows for so long that they have gotten all yellow and curly. The big one keeps making bigger and bigger station wagons and ORVs.
On the other side of the road are two competitors that have come along more recently.
One of them (Be, Inc.) is selling fully operational Batmobiles (the BeOS). They are more beautiful and stylish even than the Euro-sedans, better designed, more technologically advanced, and at least as reliable as anything else on the market–and yet cheaper than the others.
With one exception, that is: Linux, which is right next door, and which is not a business at all. It’s a bunch of RVs, yurts, tepees, and geodesic domes set up in a field and organized by consensus. The people who live there are making tanks. These are not old-fashioned, cast-iron Soviet tanks; these are more like the M1 tanks of the U.S. Army, made of space-age materials and jammed with sophisticated technology from one end to the other. But they are better than Army tanks. They’ve been modified in such a way that they never, ever break down, are light and maneuverable enough to use on ordinary streets, and use no more fuel than a subcompact car. These tanks are being cranked out, on the spot, at a terrific pace, and a vast number of them are lined up along the edge of the road with keys in the ignition. Anyone who wants can simply climb into one and drive it away for free.
Customers come to this crossroads in throngs, day and night. Ninety percent of them go straight to the biggest dealership and buy station wagons or off-road vehicles. They do not even look at the other dealerships.
Of the remaining ten percent, most go and buy a sleek Euro-sedan, pausing only to turn up their noses at the philistines going to buy the station wagons and ORVs. If they even notice the people on the opposite side of the road, selling the cheaper, technically superior vehicles, these customers deride them cranks and half-wits.
The Batmobile outlet sells a few vehicles to the occasional car nut who wants a second vehicle to go with his station wagon, but seems to accept, at least for now, that it’s a fringe player.
The group giving away the free tanks only stays alive because it is staffed by volunteers, who are lined up at the edge of the street with bullhorns, trying to draw customers’ attention to this incredible situation. A typical conversation goes something like this:
Hacker with bullhorn: “Save your money! Accept one of our free tanks! It is invulnerable, and can drive across rocks and swamps at ninety miles an hour while getting a hundred miles to the gallon!”
Prospective station wagon buyer: “I know what you say is true…but…er…I don’t know how to maintain a tank!”
Bullhorn: “You don’t know how to maintain a station wagon either!”
Buyer: “But this dealership has mechanics on staff. If something goes wrong with my station wagon, I can take a day off work, bring it here, and pay them to work on it while I sit in the waiting room for hours, listening to elevator music.”
Bullhorn: “But if you accept one of our free tanks we will send volunteers to your house to fix it for free while you sleep!”
Buyer: “Stay away from my house, you freak!”
Bullhorn: “But…”
Buyer: “Can’t you see that everyone is buying station wagons?”
This could be the best traceroute ever. Open up a terminal window and type the following:
traceroute 216.81.59.173
(If you're on Windows, use tracert instead of traceroute.)
After the first few hops, you should see the introduction to a grand space opera:
11 episode.iv (206.214.251.1) 77.898 ms 83.567 ms 80.729 ms 12 a.new.hope (206.214.251.6) 78.125 ms 79.867 ms 76.998 ms 13 it.is.a.period.of.civil.war (206.214.251.9) 84.702 ms 81.991 ms 77.786 ms 14 rebel.spaceships (206.214.251.14) 81.739 ms 94.703 ms 78.449 ms 15 striking.from.a.hidden.base (206.214.251.17) 77.288 ms 84.864 ms 78.935 ms 16 have.won.their.first.victory (206.214.251.22) 89.925 ms 79.885 ms * 17 against.the.evil.galactic.empire (206.214.251.25) 91.228 ms 81.122 ms 83.124 ms 18 during.the.battle (206.214.251.30) 79.435 ms 82.330 ms 76.135 ms 19 rebel.spies.managed (206.214.251.33) 78.177 ms 79.974 ms 81.228 ms 20 to.steal.secret.plans (206.214.251.38) 85.614 ms 82.502 ms 90.142 ms 21 to.the.empires.ultimate.weapon (206.214.251.41) 80.341 ms 79.733 ms 81.725 ms 22 the.death.star (206.214.251.46) 79.428 ms 80.002 ms 81.904 ms 23 an.armored.space.station (206.214.251.49) 80.747 ms 85.361 ms 82.703 ms 24 with.enough.power.to (206.214.251.54) 82.147 ms 80.090 ms 80.863 ms 25 destroy.an.entire.planet (206.214.251.57) 87.073 ms 79.466 ms 88.023 ms 26 pursued.by.the.empires (206.214.251.62) 78.770 ms 94.894 ms 79.687 ms 27 sinister.agents (206.214.251.65) 78.413 ms 80.727 ms 76.812 ms 28 princess.leia.races.home (206.214.251.70) 77.705 ms 79.948 ms 79.108 ms 29 aboard.her.starship (206.214.251.73) 86.378 ms 78.789 ms 80.382 ms 30 custodian.of.the.stolen.plans (206.214.251.78) 88.709 ms 77.027 ms 83.119 ms 31 that.can.save.her (206.214.251.81) 77.918 ms 79.163 ms 85.892 ms 32 people.and.restore (206.214.251.86) 81.502 ms 82.661 ms 81.129 ms 33 freedom.to.the.galaxy (206.214.251.89) 79.759 ms 81.916 ms 87.590 ms 34 0-------------------0 (206.214.251.94) 84.763 ms 82.466 ms 83.961 ms 35 0------------------0 (206.214.251.97) 89.143 ms 77.974 ms 78.518 ms 36 0-----------------0 (206.214.251.102) 80.817 ms 79.579 ms 81.443 ms 37 0----------------0 (206.214.251.105) 84.709 ms 80.502 ms 82.793 ms 38 0---------------0 (206.214.251.110) 90.891 ms 83.410 ms 83.009 ms 39 0--------------0 (206.214.251.113) 169.193 ms 80.361 ms 78.529 ms 40 0-------------0 (206.214.251.118) 82.773 ms 80.476 ms 82.109 ms 41 0------------0 (206.214.251.121) 81.907 ms 82.454 ms 85.116 ms 42 0-----------0 (206.214.251.126) 85.721 ms 82.598 ms 81.911 ms 43 0----------0 (206.214.251.129) 83.042 ms 82.609 ms 80.083 ms 44 0---------0 (206.214.251.134) 83.906 ms 83.379 ms 93.897 ms 45 0--------0 (206.214.251.137) 88.520 ms 85.748 ms 93.967 ms 46 0-------0 (206.214.251.142) 85.520 ms 77.582 ms 47 0------0 (206.214.251.145) 87.702 ms 83.947 ms 88.497 ms 48 0-----0 (206.214.251.150) 87.136 ms 80.356 ms 85.498 ms 49 0----0 (206.214.251.153) 83.413 ms 85.810 ms 83.094 ms 50 0---0 (206.214.251.158) 83.446 ms 85.608 ms 81.386 ms 51 0--0 (206.214.251.161) 82.131 ms 83.794 ms 83.073 ms 52 0-0 (206.214.251.166) 90.717 ms 86.770 ms 86.475 ms 53 00 (206.214.251.169) 89.096 ms 90.207 ms 83.345 ms 54 i (206.214.251.174) 80.697 ms 88.438 ms 85.522 ms 55 by.ryan.werber (206.214.251.177) 81.985 ms 87.495 ms 82.695 ms 56 when.ccies.get.bored (206.214.251.182) 84.011 ms 82.933 ms 83.208 ms 57 ccie.38168 (206.214.251.185) 87.235 ms 84.001 ms 83.992 ms 58 fin (206.214.251.190) 78.290 ms * *
Apparently, this is what CCIEs — Cisco Certified Internetwork Experts — do when they’re bored.
Categories
My Favourite Xcode Improvement
Xcode 4.6 was released on January 28th, the same day that iOS 6.1 was released. It adds support for iOS 6.1 and Mac OS X 10.8, and two new devices, the iPad mini and the 4th-gen iPad with Retina display. There are also a number of improvements to the LLVM compiler and Objective-C language, including some new warnings to help find subtle bugs when using ARC and weak references.
The improvement that jumped out at me is a simple one, but one that is already saving me a lot of frustration. It used to happen when typing in the class name NSString. This problem is best explained by this classic pic from the Tumblr called Texts from Xcode:
I don’t know about you, but I use NSString waaaay more than NSStream.
With Xcode 4.6, as I started typing in NSString, here’s what happened:
Autocomplete, mirabile dictu, jumped straight for NSString!
Sometimes, it’s the little things that make the experience.
