On 2/13/12 1:15 AM, Bryan Petty wrote:
my biggest concern is security, and unless your entire staff is not only good at security, but actively concerned with it as well, you have no hope of achieving it in a windows world. That specifically inclused most developers, support, accounting, management, and even admins. You *must* use mac or linux, and even those must be kept up to date on patches, or at the very least you must lock down your network and not allow any of your employees to go anywhere on the Internet that you have not specifically vetted. That includes locking down sites that cache other websites (like google).On Sun, Feb 12, 2012 at 4:48 PM, Dave Smith<[email protected]> wrote:On Feb 12, 2012, at 2:40 PM, Tod Hansmann wrote:Tell them no. There's no business case for spending 2-3x as much on the hardware to run most likely the same software (or very, very similar). None. Let me emphasize that: "no business case."Here's a business case.Offering your developers hardware they love (whatever the brand) is a great way to attract good talent. If you "save" your business a couple grand by buying a laptop that your developers don't like, you'll probably end up losing that money many times over in lost productivity. Developer hardware is no place to skimp. It's so cheap compared to other developer incentives.So very eloquently put. I just wanted to add a bit to that as well. Doing web development myself, I've found that I really *need* a *nix based OS to work in or it seriously hurts my productivity (well over the extra $1k or so it would have cost for a good Mac instead of a Windows machine). If that can be Linux, great, I actually prefer that over a Mac quite honestly (especially if a little bit of the money I'm saving the company can go for slightly better hardware specs too). However, as was pointed out in the original thread, in many companies, support for the company VPN or other required software tend to make the case of using Linux a little difficult or impossible sometimes. So in that case, it also makes sense if the company only wants to stick to supporting only Mac and Windows. That's where I will opt for a Mac.
One small malware is all a h@x0r needs to gain access to a computer inside your network, and once he has that he has access to everything that computer has access to. Firewalls will do no good if you allow port 80 outbound to anything, as the malware will be downloaded from the site your employee went to, then it will connect out and request commands to run.
Even linux and mac have potential for that kind of hack, but much smaller risk than windows.
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