Thursday, May 3rd, 2007
Never travel with The Man’s computer
Suw and I have had this conversation more times than I can remember lately: When did IT become the enemy? How many times can journalists not do their jobs because they’re locked out of their own laptops? In my previous job, I often travelled with two computers. A clean one that I could configure to my heart’s content, and the one provided by the company where I couldn’t configure the comms to file stories and couldn’t add software needed to use mobile modems or other hardware. I only bring this up because I’m at an event where a fellow journalist can’t configure his WiFi because he doesn’t have administrative right on his computer and therefore can’t post to his blog and can’t do his job.
Loading ...
May 3rd, 2007 at 9:01 pm
Can you not just get someone to override the admin rights on the locked down PC?
May 4th, 2007 at 5:03 pm
In the end, yes, this is what we did most of the time. I did favours for our offsite support team, and they in turn did favours for me, like sharing the local admin password with me.
But support is not always so supportive. And there are a fair number of places where the support is outsourced. They might not so be helpful for any number of reasons, sometimes even because it might not be in their own narrowly defined economic self interest to be helpful. Just as a for instance, mind you.
May 11th, 2007 at 9:58 am
as a recent mac covert, i blame the inherent insecurity of windows and its tendency to make it easy-peasy for vanilla users to bork their machines. this has made IT administrators paranoid about giving users and rights whatsoever and this has led to a kind of adversarial relationship between them and their users.