IT Employment

...Come with sound on the motherboard these days. Though you could disable it in the bios and then lock access to the bios.

At my last place, they blocked real audio through firewall manipulations. Pain to do, and someone always finds a way.

I understand the issue, if everyone used internet radio, the bandwidth increase would be enormous.

James

I haven't seen the authors reply to whether this a bandwidth or a control issue. If it s a bandwidth issue consider getting more band width. employees actually use the IT systems for more than entertainment.Listening to the radio on line may incresase production more than it costs.

To your question, it more of control (management). we're working on plans to increase our current bandwidth, meanwhile, I would first like to put in place ways, and means to control the Internet usages else, the increment won't be of no good, and I'm affair after the increment we might still experience the same slowness in the near future.

With the issue of disabling sound card, and others, I think it's very time consuming, instead, I'm looking at implementing AD policy, or setting up IE Retraction.

Hope someone will assist.

Thanks

you can do it through active directory for the most part the policy is under
user config/admin template/windows components/windows media/networking
disable the streaming media and point the network at a bogus proxy, then hide the networking tab, that will take care of most of it. the users can listen to CDs at their desk but can't listen to audio off the web.

for the rest of the players like real audio etc. build a softare policy under computer configuration/security settings/softare restrictions/ use the md5 hash of the .exe for the policy so even if they rename it it still won't work looks like this: 73b8b5**5e8edb68aafbadcedb012f86:42573:32771 (you will have to install all of them on your machine or find them on someone elses machine to make this work right) the biggest ones being used right now on my network are. nullsoft realaudio winamp quicktime. that should get you started.

YOU HAVE TO MAKE SURE YOUR USERS DON'T HAVE ADMIN RIGHTS ON THE BOX OR THEY CAN JUST CHANGE THE REGISTRY SETTING BACK!

to many apps nowadays. I listen to webcasts on IT topics at my desktop. If you write a veeb app it does much better with a sound card than the built in speakers. We in fact put in $5 sound cards in rows of lab data entry PCs as we have a custom written data entry program that uses sound card to notify users of various conditions.

if you have a blocking software, use this and notify users of policy. (and enforce it)
I suppose under windoze you can use groups in policy, one group might be allowed sound speakers and add people as needed for valid biz reasons?

demanding that there be system resources sucked up for non essenstials like sound on a desktop workstation is poor application design.

I did include that where it's a required part of someone's position ( webcasts for security.... ) to have it available, but if my word processor wants sound they can stuff it.

a flashing window will grab the eye on an error just as well as sound.

I'm saying that completely ripping even system speaker out of workstations for the majority is fine.

sound events are to be tossed out.
visual events work.
( unless you are talking a blind person's workstation, then accessability would be to enable sound events. )

but full multimedia on the clerical pools systems? a waste of resources. ( financial and system )

as I explained, it was a design decision. These people look at the data, not the screen and need audio feedback. Sound cards don't clog up the internet connection, playing stuff off the net does (guns don't kill people...:)

Like I said there are MANY valid uses for sound.
This sounds like the knee-jerk, dictatorial reactions I've seen on other topics, such as keylogging everyone.

Jacqui, I guess you don't do any rich media development or you'd agree sound cards are needed for many. So I'm not allowed to play KNAC.com anymore at work (if it's too loud, you're too old :)

But my webcasts (which often have only small video window, in addition to slides) do not appear to clog up our net, no one has complained.

However in some cases ANY streaming media could clog your network, I guess it depends on your network pipe and bandwidth already used, etc, so each individual situation is different.

Why not get PC's/motherboards without sound, and make it necessary to build a business case to have something custom built if you need it (blind potential employee)?