Posts by Pirate Dave

Re: Is this the same Dell...

I've never seen a boring Dell power supply. Smoking, sparking, melting, glowing, burning? Yes. Boring? Never...

Re: Rant?

Yep. A rather pale rant from the Chief Penguinista. He's capable of so much more...lol.

Re: capable hands of Windows Server 2003

If memory serves, at one point Microsoft used Xenix to write the final "gold" copy of their Windows install disks before sending them off to the duplicator house. It was ironic that even Microsoft couldn't guarantee their internal Windows machines didn't have latent virii.

Re: Other options

I miss the days when Groupwise was cool...

Re: one app per country?

Not to mention the fact that they seem to expect people to voluntarily tell the app that they have Corona. So...their entire dataset is built on voluntary submission from users. The same users who forget their 4-digit pin within 5 minutes of setting it.

And what happens when the 4Chan/Anonymous crowd (or whatever they're called these days) decide to start playing around with these "voluntary" submissions or submitting bogus submissions? It all seems like the Highway to Clusterfuck to me.

Re: ...a more streamlined way to pair Bluetooth devices in Windows

Personally, I wish they would upgrade the vanilla fall-back Bluetooth service to where it will automatically receive files sent via Bluetooth, instead of having to go into the Bluetooth settings and explicitly tell it to receive files each time. From what I can gather, Microsoft left that functionality out of their service and expects the driver to provide it. But the drivers for my craptastic Dell Latitude do not.

Re: This is why

Not to mention all those craptastic CCTV DVR boxes that came from China and require a somewhat strange version of the H.264 codec, as well as a dodgy ActiveX control, to allow you to see the recorded content.

And some of the older Raritan IP-Reach boxes also only work in the older browsers. And those suckers weren't cheap at the time.

Re: Who needs gooey?

Or the DOS Shell for those who absolutely MUST have something to click on.

Glad I wasn't the only one whose mind saw Tom Cruise rappelling from the ceiling carrying the last of those key bags.

And why do they call it a "Ceremony"? That sounds like "Eyes Wide Shut" stuff...

Re: Once again, the question is choice

"I don't make a choice because I know it won't be right for all users and I believe all users should be able to make their own choice, not have it forced upon them."

That's how software USED to be, before the age of the dumbed-down smartphone UI. Now, your choice, my choice, everyone's choice, is irrelevant to The Designers. Even Choice itself is bad. And {deity} forbid you have an opinion that in any way runs counter to the Opinions of The Designers - doing so proves that you are of lesser intelligence than The Designers and that you need to change your opinion to align with that of The Designers.

They (Google and Mozilla) could leave these choices in their about:config and leave the software intact that works on those settings. That would let us keep doing things the way we like. Hell, I wouldn't even care if the default for a choice was the polar opposite of what I'd have it set to. I just want to set my choice and have the software work the way I want it to (in many cases, work the way it ALWAYS WORKED BEFORE {this} VERSION). But that's not how The Designers work anymore. Their Choice is THE Choice, end of discussion.

Re: One day, not to far in the future,

You are, by far, over-estimating the average user.

Have you seen it recently? We use their Endpoint Protection software here on our Windows machines. It is already mind-bogglingly bloated. 20 or so components running at all times, usually eating 500-700 Megs of memory, sometimes more (and that was after I tweaked policies to turn some stuff off). The only positive thing about it is that they manage to waste that much memory without actually bogging the machine down to where it's unusable. It's merely unbearable.

The only Sophos product I ever cared much for was the Astaro firewall that they bought 8-10 years ago. They didn't force them into the borg - last I checked in 2017 or so, it was still mostly the old Astaro Linux team that was selling and supporting the UTM product.

Re: Outgoing or Incoming?

Yeah, we had a rash of this in our tenant back in mid-December. It was labeling emails from vendors and customers as "High-Confidence Phish" and shoving them into the Quarantine. I opened a ticket with MS about it, who said "Oh, looks like somebody changed your spam filtering rules on the 17th". To which I responded "I can promise you, no one here touched our spam rules", and later that day, the problem stopped. I still think they tweaked something too hard in EOP in mid-December but aren't owning-up to it.

Yeah, that's the one. Looked at the NMM component several times over the years, but never bought it. I used to love HP TopTools for Hubs and Switches - simple, but effective for my low-requirements monitoring needs. And free too, with the Procurve switches (before they got diluted with 3Com).

Re: WTF?

" working in the public sector."

Where your job would be drawing the charts for reports that praise 77% uptime.

Re: The opposite of an annoying survey is just as bad

Yeah, the "My Analytics"/Delve thing is creepy as hell. I hadn't heard of it until a month ago, and turned it off immediately. They really shouldn't be so obvious that they're skimming stuff...

Re: GDPR?

"they would lobby for congress/EU/whoever to pass a law requiring all companies that host data to ensure they can access it in plaintext for when the feds come knocking."

Eh, in the 50,000 ft view, isn't that pretty much what they're doing (or making preparations to do)?

Re: The quiet hero almost never gets the beer.

We call it "Read-Only Friday"...

Re: Times have changed

Yeah, today must be Irony Friday at El Reg...

Re: A repeat of XP?

Still have one XP VM, and a 2003 VM. We won't talk about the 2003 VM, but the XP VM runs old crusty software that's (you guessed it) crucial to the business but nobody knows how to migrate or replace easily. So it just sits there, running, laughing, beckoning, and will probably run as long as VMWare can give it virtual hardware that it likes.

Re: Workload

Digital diarrhea in its finest form.

Re: AKA Libertarians

At one point, back in the early 1990's, licensed hairdressers in the state of Georgia were required to have more training and certification than police officers. It's a strange world...

Re: "We have now run out of IPv4 addresses"

So would you have us show up at the Carrousel for a bit, or just go straight to the Soylent Green factory? We haven't been doing much the past 20 or 30 years, just keeping the wheels of Industry and Education turning, waiting for a Messiah such as yourself to come along and point out how utterly wasteful our lives have been. Thanks, mate. You've set us free now.

Re: SSD Auto-Bork

Agreed. The time-limited auto-bork capability doesn't really seem like a great selling point, IMHO. Like selling a car with... uh, sorry, almost started a car analogy there. Why would the firmware bork the storage just because a certain number of hours had passed? That truly doesn't make any sense at all.

Re: advertising

Valid points. Perhaps my memories have a haze of youth to them, but it seems to me that the media bias in the 70's and 80's was much less pronounced than it is today. I don't know that the world is smaller, but it sure is louder.

Re: A 20-year support cycle

If that is the BIOS for the 440BX motherboards, those things were awesome pieces of kit back in the late 90's and early 2000's. Rock solid, stable, reliable. Maybe not the fastest, most cutting-edge board available, but damn, they just kept going and going. I wouldn't doubt that thousands of them are still chugging along in service. I sold probably a hundred of them in various systems, and issues were scant.

Although, I guess the better question is why would folks still need a BIOS update this late in the game? I would think that the folks still using and maintaining systems using these aging boards would likely have already updated the BIOS, or would have several copies of Intel's update on thumbdrives and CDs scattered all over the shop.