Posts by Roland6

>In my sector (HE) the question is: Why do we need a big campus anymore?

Because the management wanted a big campus (same-place same-time working) and dismissed same-time different place working (ie. working from home) as being too difficult, requiring too much management overhead etc..

>The other question our place is asking: Why the heck did we buy loads of desktop PCs?

Because they were cheaper than laptops and because as all your people worked on campus at desks, they didn't need laptops.

Basically, this last month management has had to face the reality of what technology can actually do now.

I wager, if you had asked the same management in January ie. before CoViD19 spread outside of China, they would have found many reasons why they should continue to require all staff to work on a big campus and thus have desktops; suggestions that events in Wuhan (never heard of it - they probably would have said) might have a massive impact in a few weeks on the business would have been dismissed as scaremongering...

>Wow that News Bar is just awful.

And a total waste of screen estate.

Lets hope that both end users and GPE can easily turn it off permanently.

Re: Wedge

Haven't you realised, a 'smart' phone is your identity card...

I suspect that in the near future the government will provide free 'smart' phones to every one and legislate that they must be switched on and carried at all times outside of your home...

Re: Bugger

Surprised given his other comments on his government's response to CoViD19 he didn't mention the word 'pray' once.

Re: Simple solution

There is no copyright issue - the escrow contractual clause handles that; which the project leader will have signed up to on creating their project on GitHub et al.

The issue which the clause needs to resolve, is as you note, is the maintenance of the dependency network so that core-js(2020) can simply take over from legacy core-js(Denis Pushkarev) and users don't see any change.

Given the age of many open source projects, and their leaders, I expect we will be seeing this handover problem occurring regularly in the coming decade.

Re: Simple solution

Escrow isn't new or rocket science. Github (and other open-source repositories) simply need to amend their standard terms of service for projects to include an escrow clause, allowing them once certain conditions have been satisfied to transfer the ownership of a project in the absence of the project's designated lead maintainer...

Re: Old blocks that not abide to current rules should not be routed

>Making them non routable will drop their usefulness and value to 0.

Might get a call from the US military/defense establishment - they seem to be sitting on rather a lot of /8 address ranges...

>For one, the pool is in no way free.

Given the recent events at ICAAN, can't help but think Wilson was thinking more of his potential slice of the resale revenues such a cache of IP addresses could deliver...

Re: In 3.. 2.. 1..

>The guys who learned from Cisco seem to put the gateway at .1.

Given the origins of Cisco, I suspect they just picked up a pre-existing convention, which was probably set by Jon Postel et al: ".1" is only two characters to be keyed, ".254" is four - important in the time before DNS and RIP...

Re: Home PC accessing the corporate network? Hell no!

Bet they allow OWA...

If you're prepared to take the licencing hit, WS2012 and later supports the Remote Desktop web client...

Re: The most simple way is not mentioned here?

>The next level is what you talk about, a full Windows Terminal Server, which require your mentioned RDP CAL.

Which (if memory is right) is concurrent user-session based not actual machine, named individual or location based. Hence if you have a correctly licenced RD or TS (without without gateway systems) for normal office use, it is correctly licenced for remote access by those same users.

So the licence issues only really appear when under normal circumstances an organisation with a large user population but low level of concurrent RD/TS users changes to one with a large level of concurrent RD/TS users.

About the only licence issue an organisation may encounter is if they decide to use a Windows server as the VPN host, but who in their right minds would do that when dedicated VPN appliances are readily available and can be up and running in minutes compared to building a Windows VPN server.

Re: "not giving Windows 10 enough headroom"

>Partitions ? Yeah, it's heard of them

But only for its own comsumption.

A clean install of W10 will happily create 4 partitions, only 1 of which is "C:\" and user accessible.

It amused me that doing a vanila install from MS supplied media that W10 automatically creates an OEM recovery partition without giving me any option in the matter; furthermore I'm not aware of any OEM that provides a recovery partition image (and tools) that I can download and install into this reserved partition.

Re: "not giving Windows 10 enough headroom"

>Windows will remove old files and update-related downloads after a month.

Bet when W10 is showing the error seen at Ikea, normal housekeeping procedures such as this get put on hold or even better actually get done but the update process displaying the message doesn't get updated to the new state. So when some poor engineer takes a look there is a practically empty HDD...

Re: I Hate This Panic Buying!

Hope it was the superduper one - complete with a variety of useful attachments so you can offer your services in the coming weeks and months to the "Good Life" brigade...

A friend once complained the shaver they brought, whilst good and came with lots of attachments, was missing the attachment to use it on your boat. As he didn't own a boat or have even stepped on a boat, he naturally got the p*** taken and still gets reminders.

>Ourselves we ended up with 9 Dell Vostro's.

Seem to be solid systems, whilst not particularly exciting specification-wise or visually, the do seem to take the knocks and last - one client has been using Vostros as their mobile classroom laptops since 2012 about a third of their current classroom laptops are from that original batch.

Re: Delays

For one client I've just completed going through their store of "for disposal" laptops - I've been pleasantly surprised just how easily windows 10 installed on Dell Latitude/HP ProBook laptops (i3 and better variants) dating back to circa 2012 and yes the impression is that Win10 (1909) - after it has sorted itself out is slightly snapper than the pre-installed W7/W8 images.

Obviously, the laptops have received a physical clean - superclean keyboard cleaning gel is surprisingly good at its job - plus your hands also get a good cleaning. But people have been really pleased to be given a laptop and not really cared that it might be 'ancient'.

However, my experience with doing similar with HP/Dell desktops isn't quite so positive.

Re: and desks and chairs at IKEA

>Swedish doesn't do grave or acute accent marks.

You mean Ikea product names are actually correct Swedish and mean something in Swedish?

Re: Garbage

>The concept of RM is sound: a series of machines that are consistently built, tested and configured, allowing them to be scaled up in number and supported by a team who don't need to worry about a million Frankensteined configuration and specifications when troubleshooting.

It has been a little surprising that RM didn't grasp the post-2012 education environment with both hands and promote the usage of systems based on Rasberry Pi's and so support and enhance its UK-based ecosystem.

Re: The number of p155 takers ruining it for genuine contractors

>Any staff carpark below exec level makes it transparent - the good cars almost always belong to a contractor.

Going all the way back in the 1980's this situation made me wryly smile; being aware of the monthly lease cost of company cars. The only reliable conclusion I decided wasn't so much the saving of the £10~20 p/month - which could be funded by employees (ie. for £200pcm fully funded by the company you can have a Ford Focus, contribute an additional £20 pcm from your salary and you can have a BMW 5 series instead... Yes I know I'm exaggerating to make my point, but it's not totally off the truth of the matter) but the maintaining of differentials and perceiptions; customers form a different perception of a company (and its representatives) if for example the engineers drive BMW's as opposed to Vauxhall Cavaliers.

Re: One-nation Barmy

>Sick pay is a taxable benefit?

Don't pay NI, don't get SSP!

Sick pay is treated as income for tax purposes, so is fully subject to income tax.

Re: So they know it’s damaging...

>I think the disease is COVID-19

Yes that is the official name, however you will see both the mainstream media and social media also using #Corvid-19., my mistake in not double checking what I was actually typing...

Re: The number of p155 takers ruining it for genuine contractors

>So long as your paying your correct taxes contract all you want, but pay your correct taxes like non contractors do.

But what exactly does this mean?

A contractor employed by a major SI can easily be on a £100K package (including overheads) ie. cost £500 per day, but sold at £1200 per day. We can assume (as HMRC assumes this) this employee (and employer) are paying the correct tax on these £500 pday.

Now I can undercut the SI and charge £800 pday for an identical level of service and pay myself (the employee of my company) the £500 pday rate out of this.

For some reason HMRC with IR35 has deemed that this arrangement doesn't satisfy the "broadly the same tax as those employed directly" criteria...

Re: So they know it’s damaging...

>But in fairness, would you rather want to run the gauntlet of travelling into work by virus-infected public transport and then onto the infested open plan office ?

That's normal life (ie. running the gauntlet of travelling into work by virus-infected public transport and then onto the infested open plan office), the only difference is today that there is the potential to pick up SARS-CoV-2. [Yes, the virus is officially catalogued as SARS-CoV-2, the disease it causes is Corvid-19.]

Re: Cerf returned a polite, but firm no

>There's no doubt that Vint is a bright guy and that he's scrupulously correct and polite face to face, but, like Rees-Mogg...

He's not that bright.

It is clear the Vint who serves Alphabet,i is just a shadow of the younger Vint who helped lay the foundations of the Internet.

There is really no reason why Alphabet couldn't "publish information about algorithms and neural networks", there are plenty of people out-there fully capable of reading and understanding them, however, the real problem is that these would reveal the full extent to which the human hand is still necessary to manipulate the "complex interconnection of weights that take input in and pop something out to tell us you know what quality a particular web page is".

Re: Windows appears in the most unlikely places

>And of course a photocopier must retain, somewhere, images of documents of which it is producing copies...

Yes and so do many printers,. It is a big headache in designing fully functional secure infrastructures for those that require (and demand) real security.

However, if you speak nicely to enterprise secure printer sales at HP and other vendors. you will find they do sell versions which support certificate-based HDD encryption and memory overwrite etc. to remove all traces of (the de-encrypted) print file from disk & memory. Most companies don't use this style of machine as they are both expensive and tend to require a user (and 'owner' of the print file) to be present to oversee the printing.