Storing Passwords

By Homer Bartlett

If you follow password security guidelines, you should have a unique password for each online service you use. That way if one service provider does get compromised and some ne’er-do-well in Russia gets your password, he can’t get into all the other online services he might guess that you use. But a study from 2010 reveals that 75% of people use the same password for social media sites that they use for their email. Why? Well one obvious reason is a false sense of security, but a more practical reason is convenience. Who wants to (or can) remember dozens of unique passwords? Some folks keep a text document or spreadsheet with their various passwords in it. But typical desktop software has notoriously weak password protection, so instead here are 2 better ways to do it, one for Mac and one for Windows. continue reading

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Adobe Introduces Subscription Licensing

By Homer Bartlett

One of the great aspects of cloud computing, or software-as-a-service, is that it scales efficiently (making it a good strategy for operating in tough financial times). Paying per mailbox per month for email hosting, for instance, scales down gracefully when your summer interns go back to school. But if you had an internal Exchange server you would have had to purchase Exchange Client Access Licenses (CALs) for those interns to have mailboxes, CALs that now sit idle for 9 months, money wasted.

With the introduction of Creative Suite 5.5, Adobe has introduced Subscription Licensing, whereby you can pay per month for the software you need, rather than buying the licenses outright. This makes a lot of sense for creative companies who might have some number of permanent creatives on staff and bring in contractors and freelancers on a project basis. Bringing in a freelancer for a 3-month project? Not sure you’ll still have enough work in a couple of months to keep that new designer you just hired? Don’t shell out $1,700 for CS5.5 Design Premium, “rent” it instead for $139/month.

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IT Is An Investment, Not An Expense

By Mike Landman

IT is often seen as an expense. It’s treated as an expense on most income statements, and most companies work as hard as possible to minimize it, like any other expense. Except that IT is not an expense, any more than hammers are an expense for carpenters, or factories are for manufacturers.

IT is, for most modern companies, the means of production. The No. 1 tool of the trade for knowledge workers. That makes it an investment. Ask any craftsman the best ways to screw up a job: Crappy tools. Cheap tools. The wrong tools for the job. But, all too often, since IT is treated as an expense, rather than as investment, it is skimped on, stretched and ignored. Which is weird because the employee using that tool might make $150,000 in the three years that his or her $1500 computer is usable. A 1 percent investment. At Ripple, we try to help our clients see the value in keeping IT current, and we give them strategies for doing so in the least painful ways possible. Here are a few things that can help: continue reading

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