Posts by Roland6

Re: Azure

> Could you imagine the fallout if it became apparent that Microsoft don't trust the shit they're selling?

Different times…

I remember Sun Microsystems had an IBM for its accounting and HR systems… don’t know if they had managed to migrate away to Sun hardware etc. before Oracle acquired them.

Re: Azure

> The world+dog have been moving to Linux year on year

These are “customers” or “service users”, the use of the word “engineer” is interesting and would seem to be referring to MS’s internal market.

Re: Azure

I found this statement very telling:

” Microsoft started CBL-Mariner because it needed an internal Linux distro and a consistent platform for the myriad workloads engineers were running on Azure, according to Jim Perrin, principal program manager for Microsoft Azure Linux.”

It would seem MS’s own engineers prefer developing on and for platforms other than Windows…

Re: Too late the hero

Your domestic XP machine, if behind a standard NAT router/firewall is only really vulnerable when it has an active internet connection. So if all you use it for is reading El reg and the BBC say, the likelihood of catching any malware is very low.

Interestingly, recently been using a Windows system that has Avast installed, along with the Avast “secure” browser which by default uses Bing for search. I have found the experience educational; Bing will return more results in the first pages that are either dubious or will result in the AV blocking as “source of malware” if you try and visit than Chrome…

There was a website that had the OEM additions, so you could take any OEM install CD and convert it to another OEM. I used this to reinstall, a bunch of HP desktops using a Dell OEM CD. Obviously, the fun and games is sourcing the stuff that was on the OEM drivers disk…

Does the PC support a second HDD?

For slow systems using an external IDE/SATA drive connected to a motherboard connector, provides a much quicker duplication of a hard drive.

With XP there are three files that are needed for activation (6 files for x64 XP). A few years back there were websites and articles that provided the resources necessary to activate XP without contacting Microsoft.

Re: DO NOT go on the Internet with XP

Looks like a nice set of features for a honey trap system… just need to add the monitoring and reporting software…

Re: It wasn't broke so we fixed it...

> Sheesh, grandad, get with the times!”

Wouldn’t that involve migrating to MS Dynamics …

Re: It's not THAT hard!

That will because they believe nursing is an unskilled job and thus lower pay…

Re: It's not THAT hard!

Labour in 2009 mandated new nurses required a degree as from 2013. As this wasn’t changed, we can assume the Tories were in agreement.

> Take one hospital - detach from the NHS

Don’t disagree with a prototyping approach, although with supposedly 30 new hospitals on the cards, there is an opportunity to start with a “greenfield” hospital.

The art will be keeping people’s expectations in check, as can foresee media, politicians and public getting upset if large service improvements are seen, as everyone will be clamouring for immediate deployment across the entire NHS…

> The evidence is change in something as big and complex as the NHS is impossible.

Depends on what you mean by change, in the last decade I suggest the NHS has become wholly dependent on IT to function…

Remember the division of the NHS into independent trusts, supposedly to introduce competition, has just added to the complexity. So a big part of the problem is down to politically motivated organisational structure…

Re: NHS Linux

However, with “NHS Linux”, the release cadence can be internally managed as can the dependencies.

With this target suppliers can build packages. From the experience of manufacturing, I suspect the minimum period of release stability is 7 years and probably needs to be more like 10~15 years…

Whilst some may laugh at say using W7 today, we need to remember the fundamental problem isn’t that W7 is unable to run todays workloads, it is because MS stop supporting it and so stop doing security patches and driver updates to support new technology. They did this because it was better commercially to deliver a “new” OS than to charge for support. Interestingly, the subscription model encourages release longevity..

Re: It's not THAT hard!

> Ultimately saving money as they won't need to work shifts for agencies

Tory solution: ban NHS trusts from hiring agency staff whilst doing nothing about the shortage of people being trained…

> How come the changes they want take so long to come into force and are delivered so badly?

Politicians want their moment of glory and be associated with a new shiny - hence why we have HS2 (which was the brain wave of a politician wanting to improve their image)and not capital investment in the existing network.

The level of change required in both the NHS and its IT, will take longer than the five year term in office and the attention span of the typical politician and media.

So as history teaches us, a new government come into office, start with big announcements etc., appoint a minister who starts the ball rolling, however, things don’t get better immediately (natural because of delivery lead times) and so in the inevitable cabinet shuffle, a new minister is appointed. They need to be seen to do something and so tinker or even totally overrule the project started by their predecessor…

The evidence is change in something as big and complex as the NHS, will need to be incremental and paced over time, plus the politicians once they have set the ball rolling, will need to step back…

Re: Real problem with Doctors ...

> All for a £65K - £80K debt when leaving Medical School

For UK students studying and then working in the UK, the student loan isn’t a traditional style debt. Obviously, for foreign students and those who decide to work aboard it does become debt.

Re: Stammering his way to another disaster

Also the way the Tories divided the NHS up into “trusts” putting barriers in the way of them cooperating and sharing IT etc.

> Design by committee

It’s a large complex system(s), committees are going to be involved, yes someone has to make a decision and get the various architects etc. to agree etc..

>Top-down design

It’s the only way to design stuff. Obviously, you can go to extremes such as full stepwise waterfall, but most large systems design methodologies incorporate elements of agile.

> Dwelling at OSI layers 8, 9 and 10

There is much that is needed at these layers, as they are directly applicable to healthcare.

The IT systems approach needed is a combined top down and bottom up injection of technology.

I suspect a big part of the NHS IT problem is is the size of systems and the expanding rich data files; many of which I suspect are proprietary and can only read by applications running on specific OS platforms.

Re: Corporate use

>” An additional advantage … RDP onto a "client" running in the same datacenter as the database server makes managing data much faster”

Agree this in some cases can make sense, remember using this model as It meant we weren’t constrained by the more limited office LAN to remote data centre bandwidth. However, cloud and most certainly the windows 365 service, doesn’t give you these nice colocation performance levels or guarantees that such performance levels are possible; although it might be available at additional cost…

Re: Corporate use

> Allow an employee to use their own PC to connect

Naturally, this stuff will require a W11 capable PC, thus new rather than the existing stuff that runs W10 and/or earlier ..

Reading between the lines and thinking about what people are wanting to do, this would seem to be Microsoft’s take on X11 terminals, as the typical desktop (cloud or otherwise) will increasingly have sessions to discrete applications/systems on different clouds, yet need to be treated/integrated as if they were all running locally on the desktop.

Re: Am I in an American Teen Horror Movie?

Yes, as this is Microsoft expect to access Windows 365 you will need a “dumb” terminal running Windows 11…

Re: What do these give you that an electric bicycle does not?

Looking at the Weel video, just another opportunity for a naff design school concept bike. Which (naturally) doesn’t have the conventional attachment points or dimensions so no opportunity to utilise a the vast market in bicycle accessories such as planners, racks etc. because that would ruin the “design aesthetics”…

Given the brief: a single person lightweight transporter capable of up to 20 miles that can be mass produced, and the massive amounts of experience in designing bicycle and mopeds/scooters I’m a little surprised at the amount of rubbish being offered.

Re: Passwords

Step 1: bar remote admin login to the Windows server and RDS server. If needed remote admin access is probably best achieved via tools such as TeamViewer, or VPN(*2) since only IT literate people should be using this.

Step 2: make sure you are running a server security suite (eg. Panda AD360 (*1)) which has RDS connection protections enabled.

Step 3: Disable legacy RDS logins, which will mean only W10/W11 clients will be able to connect.

Step 4: on the router block all internet traffic fromRussia and satellites and from China et al.

(*1) my complaint with Panda is that whilst it will detect and block many styles of attack on the RDS, it gives very little information that will enable you to put mitigations in place, such as blocking countries and specific ISPs. This can be problematic from a resolution perspective, as for a while it decided Virgin Media (UK) was a source of attacks, so home users with Virgin internet were unable to connect…

(*2) vpn terminated on the router also permits remote admin to access the router’s admin port, without having to expose this to the public internet.

Re: Passwords

The nice thing abound having the VPN terminated on the router is that access to the Windows server(in any form) is only possible once you have established the VPN and domain access credentials…

Re: Passwords

Trouble is… Microsoft…

Remember we are talking about systems being used by real users, not IT.

For a vpn such as OpenVpn to work reliably with Microsoft’s Remote Desktop (which many small organisations use as its free) the tools need to permit a user to click on a single desktop icon which establishes the vpn connection and starts the RDP client, close the RDS connection and the VPN connection also needs to be automatically dropped.

I remember having this functionality in third-party connectio managers that were around in the late 1990s for W95 and W2K, but it isn’t part of Windows unless you want to write a custom script which Windows will raise a security flag everytime it is run because it isn’t signed…

It is things like this that really show how little real development has happened with Windows these past 20 plus years…

Re: Standard batteries

> but that will often mean the mouse contains batteries that are soldered in

What I found surprising was how many of these battery packs were just AAA batteries soldered and wrappered together into a single pack

My issue with AAA rechargeables has been finding some that can maintain a useable amount of charge for a reasonable length of time. If you’ve been used to using decent heavy duty AAA batteries in your mouse and remotes, it is noticeable irritating how quickly rechargeables discharge.