Re: upvoted for new word
"...I will definitely add asphyxiwank to my vocabulary..."
See also "Stranglewank" :-)
Posts by TonyJ
1599 publicly visible posts • joined 30 Dec 2010
Page:
Musk roundly booed on-stage at Dave Chappelle gig
Microsoft launches full-court press to save $69B Activision deal
UK lawmakers look to enforce blocking tools for legal but harmful content
Monday 12th December 2022 11:55 GMT
Re: Grow a brain
This line struck me: "As for children the parents should be monitoring and controlling their activities on and off line. That is a parents job, not the school, Government or nanny/babysitter." because whenever I used to get asked about software to monitor kids activities online I always used to say there isn't any that a savvy kid can't find a way to bypass. The best way to do this is be a parent - move the computer into a room where you can see it. Look at what they do on their phones.
Stop expecting software companies and governments to do your job for you.
Victims of IT scandal in UK postal service will get fresh compensation
Wednesday 7th December 2022 13:42 GMT
Re: Bring manglement to book
Absolutely this!
From earlier articles, I believe that senior managers have been proven to have known that there were serious issues with Horizon - both within the Post Office and Fujitsu and yet they lied and were happy to see livelihoods and in some cases, lives, lost. Lied under oath, lets remember.
Add up all the time the people impacted by this spent in jail. Then double it and share the time out between the senior staff.
And whilst you're at it force them to sell their assets - after all they were effectively gained via illegal actions - and give the proceeds to the above people.
This is one of, if not the worst miscarriage of justice the UK has ever seen and yet the real criminals continue to walk around free.
Also as a side note - it's time private companies (PO, TFL etc) had powers to arrest and prosecute removed. They aren't the police.
'What's the point of me being in my office, just because they want to see me in the office?'
Tuesday 29th November 2022 13:04 GMT
Technology vs Management
We've had the technology to enable working from home for well over a decade now.
What we have always lacked is a desire for [middle] managers to lose their concept of control and to not have their empire visible to the higher echelons.
I've worked from home on and off a lot over the 5 or 6 years prior to lockdown.
My day can be a little less structured. If I need to pop out, I can/will (obviously working it around other commitments)
I can get out of bed later but start a little earlier and I don't feel knackered by a long commute - even a 1 hour commute is 10 hours a week wasted. And it's hardly good for the environment sat in traffic all that time.
Ditto finish a little later if needed but I still have an excellent work/life balance
No. No is a powerful, empowering, word. It's one I learned many many years ago before this - set expectations early and stick to them. No, I won't be on your 6.30pm call. No I won't "just work a little extra" here and there. No. You pay me for 40 hours, you get 40 hours. Yes, I will bend with notice if necessary or if I am needed for say a P1 event but otherwise - NO
No, I won't do lunchtime calls "because everyone's diary seems free at 1.30pm".
And no, I won't be monitored by spyware - get someone else.
And of course, ultimately, no, I won't return to the office 5 days a week or even set days a week. I don't need to. Doubly so given that I am currently engaged in a massive project that encompasses the UK and Australia (which I knew upfront and decided it was interesting enough to start earlier some days of the week - but I finish that much earlier that day, or bank them up to Friday afternoon!).
The key part is - I deliver. On time. In budget. And to a high quality. I'd love to know what these middle managers I called out above think being in an office brings?
Jaguar Land Rover courts coders caught in big tech layoffs
HP Inc to lay off up to 6,000 staff, cut costs by $1.4 billion
Twitter engineer calls out Elon Musk for technical BS in unusual career move
Tuesday 15th November 2022 09:14 GMT
Re: Bit klunky, but...
You say:
"...I've had a fair bit of experience working at startups and I've found that CEO's actually like their information straight. (One told me that he liked me being in meetings because he needed to know what was really going on and not what people thought he wanted to hear.)...
And then:
I've had programmers tell me I don't know what I'm talking about like this fellow. When I hear this I tend to think of it as a red flag, an indication that there is a problem
Which is it? You want it straight or not? Sounds like the programmer - the guy actually responsible for writing the code in the Android app pointed out what was actually wrong. No BS, but a straight answer to a straight question of "what is the problem, then?"
You can't have it both ways. If you want straight answers to straight questions, then don't get pissy and scream "ah red flags here" when you get it.
Go ahead, be rude. You don't know it now, but it will cost you $350,000
Friday 11th November 2022 11:51 GMT
Re: "Shouting" at the wrong person
"...He found out, on the first day at his new, that the multi-nationals had recently merged and had the same CEO..."
Did he live with his head in the sand? Mergers don't just pop up complete one Monday morning - especially so for multinationals!
Sounds like the company may not have been the entire issue here.
Friday 11th November 2022 09:31 GMT
And so began my boycott of all things Sony...
... I think I've told this story before on here but back around 2000/2001 I had a Sony camcorder. One of those that used the small DAT-type tapes.
Anyway it went faulty so I duly took it to the local Sony repair centre.
After several weeks where I had to keep phoning despite promises to call me back etc, there was never any consistent story and it was clear they weren't able or willing (or both) to actually find what was wrong with it.
And then this particular day, I called and the person who answered didn't put me on hold like he thought. And shouted to the person I assume was his boss "It's that cunt chasing his fucking camcorder again. What shall I tell the idiot this time?"
He came back all nice and polite and gave some bullshit. At which point I said "tell your boss that cunt as you just called me wants to talk to him.
Much grovelling later it was agreed that they couldn't fix it, that of course there would be no charge and in fact they gave me something like £150 in compensation as way of apology.
I sold the thing on eBay I think for spares/repair so ultimately made not much of a loss on it (it was second hand when I bought it).
I'd already made up my mind to avoid Sony products after that. What they then did with their awful behaviour towards Geohot back in the PS3 days just reinforced that I'd made the right decision.
I'm happy paying Twitter eight bucks a month because price isn't the same as value
Thursday 10th November 2022 14:22 GMT
I use Twitter to keep up to date with more highbrow celebs and a few parody accounts (RAF Luton for one) and use Facebook to keep in touch with far away relatives and subscribe to a few special interest hobby groups where the trolling and abuse is virtually non existent.
If you're going to engage in the more toxic parts - well, the old saying applies - "lie with dogs and you'll get fleas". Or that boring twit in your local pub - you're not forced to sit at his table and listen or argue with him.
Couldn't agree more. Facebook is useful to me for finding out about dive trips - even better for the last minute ones. My youngest son's rugby coach uses it exclusively for posting team and match information. Other than that, I follow a few funny / parody type pages and pages of interest to me but rarely, if ever, post anything.
Same for Twitter - I follow a handful of interesting people and parody accounts. I get a lot of short term entertainment from it and completely avoid the toxic nature of the rest of it.
Horses for courses, as the saying goes. I see it as very much like the old 1980's arguments for the lack of morality on our TV screens - if you don't like it, don't watch (or in this case read and engage) with it.
Now does anyone know what this helicopter is...
Not sure but I bet the photograph was taken from a Canberra... ;-)
Microsoft tests 'upsells' of its products in Windows 11 sign-out menu
Wednesday 9th November 2022 09:46 GMT
Re: Tacky Windows in the corporate world too?
"...That said, I was surprised by your account of MS Windows in a commercial environment. I imagined "enterprise" versions stripped of irrelevant nonsense, else strippable through options available to IT personnel..."
I must admit I rarely see what others are complaining about, but my own system is and has been for as long as a version in MAPS has been a thing, Enterprise.
Even a new install prior to any lockdowns or customisations are applied from SCCM/Intune/GPO on Enterprise comes fresh installed with a fairly clean interface.
Still, some silliness creeps through occasionally although these seem to be baked into the OS (looking at you, XBOX gaming bar! WTH is that doing on an Enterprise build?)
That said whenever I use someone's machine with a Home version, I am aghast at the sheer levels of shit that are in there. It's just awful.
Vonage to pay $100m for making it nearly impossible to cancel internet phone services
Monday 7th November 2022 14:12 GMT
"...I still can't work out whether it was just a case of *massive* incompetence (and an end-result of their extremely high staff turnover) or whether it was a deliberate policy..."
If I had to guess, it'd be the latter. Comms companies can be the absolute worst to deal with and pull this kind of crap all the time. I suspect that they believe they're too big to be sued by small companies.
Hot, sweaty builders hosed a server – literally – leaving support with an all-night RAID repair job
Friday 4th November 2022 09:55 GMT
Ah builders
Did a migration about 15 years ago for a re-insurance company. We moved their servers into cages in a pair of co-lo data centres.
At this point in time though, thanks to BT there was no connectivity to the backup site.
One day I was sat in the office in a meeting when the calls went out that "everything had stopped".
A quick check to see and a walk to the data centre (it was only 400 metres down the road) and when I went up to the cage it was immediately apparent what was wrong.
With no permission / notification of works, the owners of the data centre were installing a new cable tray above our cage. The builders, being careful, had draped blankets over the entire row of racks. Of course there was no airflow and eventually due to heat they shut themselves down.
Strong words were had.
Even earlier than that - c1997 - and another server room move for a large shipping company in Southampton. We got word from the builders that the new server room was ready. I was but a junior engineer so above my pay grade, the decision was made to ship the racks.
Only the room wasn't quite finished - there was no suspended floor. The posts for it were there but no posts. The builders had apparently taken a gamble they'd arrive before the kit and lost. And no one on our side of the project had taken time to check what they were saying was factual. Oops. We drove down to be there at 6.30am only to have to turn around and come home!
The world was promised 'cloud magic'. So much for that fairy tale
Thursday 3rd November 2022 09:57 GMT
Re: "Cloud" or...
"...Funny it looks just like a mainframe to me..."
I came to say exactly this!
For a few decades, there was a massive push to get a computer in every home and on every desk to give you, dear users, control.
As with all things we've gone full circle.
I worked for one company who had their own power station on site because they ran a massive manufacturing plant.
And yet the MS salesdrones repeatedly tossed out the line "you save a stack of cash on electricity and cooling when you move to Azure..."
The boss worked in a fishbowl, so office tricks were a treat
Monday 31st October 2022 13:57 GMT
Re: Pranks and things
I have a mug from c 1997 that was a present from Citrix during a time working for a company that I have *very* fond memories of.
One of my sons cracked it rendering it unusable.
Did the mug hold sentimental value? Yep, but if it was *that* important to me it would have been stored away somewhere out of danger.
Things are just things. Someone wrote my car off a couple of weeks ago. I loved that car. No one was hurt so beyond the slight inconvenience it doesn't really matter. They're just things.
What I cherish more from my days at various places are the memories I have and the friends I made.
You also seem to have missed the part where I said I regretted what I did to his mug because as a callow youth I didn't think it through beforehand but hey-ho.
Monday 31st October 2022 10:34 GMT
Re: Pranks and things
My goodness.
Of course I got pranked back. In spades. In return for breaking his mug, he left a box of spiders - all neatly packed and quite professional looking from a label perspective (we did have a franking machine so not that difficult back then) on my desk to open, knowing full well I was very arachnophobic.
He also tried to get me to wash my hands "in the hottest water I could stand" when I first go toner on them, hoping it would bond.
Then there's the time he turned some small caps around on a piece of kit I was working on to make them go pop to make me jump.
Another place, another guy crept up behind me and smacked a steel ruler down just as I turned a piece of kit I'd repaired on. I almost shit bricks.
I fell for the old trick once of someone taking a snapshot of my desktop background and hiding my icons after setting the screenshot as the wallpaper - sadly it took much longer to cotton on to that than it should have, including a couple of reboots.
I will have to try and remember the others that I was a the recipient to.
It's probably also worth pointing out as well, that said pranks above happened over a span of around 10 years or more.
I dunno - some folks seem to want to get offended on the behalf of others without even taking the time for a little bit of critical thinking. I wasn't even always the instigator of some of the pranks, just recounting them (e.g. the security strip).
At no point can I recall anyone ever being genuinely/long term upset at any of the pranks we all played on one another. Get a grip.
Monday 31st October 2022 09:38 GMT
Pranks and things
Have a few over the years.
My first place of work, I had a colleague - great bloke but a bit of a curmudgeon. He had a mug for his tea that no one was permitted to even look sideways at. It was one of those that had decades of staining.
In a moment of silliness (I really didn't think it through), when he left the workshop one day, I poured his tea into another mug, drilled a hole in the bottom of his and screwed it to the desk. I then refilled it. When he walked back in and tried to pick his mug up, the handle snapped clean off! Oops.
At college we found out that if you made an ioniser you could use it to charge things like leaves on plants, or the rim of a pint pot so when someone brushed against it, or drank from it, they'd get a jolt.
Also at college we had a couple of quite unpleasant lecturers. For one, he used to make a big thing about locking the door to the classroom despite it being empty other than a chalkboard, desks, chairs and bin.
One day the window was open so we sneaked in and stuck all the furniture onto the ceiling, exactly as it had been on the floor (inverted, obviously).
One of the guys there also used to trip the alarm in the library every single visit. Which could be painful as the turnstile was nut-height for him. Someone had taken a security strip out of a book and managed to feed it into the lining of his coat. Oh and as far as anti-theft went, they were easily defeated as I saw first hand by the student lobbing a couple of books out of a window in one far corner of the library to then go and collect.
At uni we blew flour under another students door and coated everything in there white. Another time we planted cress on the floor of a room and watered it. He was away at the time and came back to a cress lawn.
I am sure there were plenty of other silly things as well but these come to mind.
Why I love my Chromebook: Reason 1, it's a Linux desktop
Sunday 30th October 2022 13:29 GMT
Re: offer to install Linux
"...Uh huh. Try dealing with *my* family that doesn't take "no" for an answer. "Don't mess me about, you know this computer stuff! Fix my [underspecced virus-ridden] machine!"..."
Not sure how to respond to that other than to say you're the problem not them.
And that's not a dig. I say this as a person who volunteers at my local library every second Saturday to spend a few hours helping the elderly with their tech.
There are a number of common themes run through the sessions:
Teach me everything about everything IT. Sorry that's not what these sessions are for! I've worked in IT for 30+ years and don't know half of it yet so let's try to answer your questions about/fix the issue on the kit you have
My son works in IT but hasn't got the time to help / talks to me in a language I don't uderstand*
I am scared if I do something wrong, I'll break it.
My son/the man in the shop recommended this. I don't know how to use it. Please help.
How do I do x on device y?
I try to answer each question as best I can in a way they will understand and I never try to impose my own will on their choices. It isn't my place. I will advise if asked specifically (and they all have Mac or Windows on a PC because it was their when they bought/inherited it - and no fucking way I'd suggest wiping and starting again with Linux).
*I think you are here. You have set ideas and aren't amenable to helping them.
Also - where are all these Windows devices that are "riddled" with viruses? I haven't seen on "riddled" since the days of XP and people using the stupid activation bypass applications that borked Windows updates.
Linux absolutely has it's place in the desktop ecosphere but not everywhere on every device.
Friday 28th October 2022 09:41 GMT
Re: Security
Agree with this.
A reasonable article but a few comparisons didn't add up.
Comparing Windows 7 for example - it had a decade of mainstream support. When extended (obviously caveated by expensive, paid for) support ends in 2023 that's 14 years of support that was available.
Perhaps comparing it to Windows 10 would've been slightly more accurate as both Chrome OS and Win 10 have telemetry. But again from 2015 release to 2025 end-date you get 10 years of support.
Per my comments to an earlier article this week on El Reg, sweating Windows hardware these days isn't that difficult. I have family running old machines of mine that are 10+ years old and all it took to get them performing better than new was an SSD and occasionally a bit of RAM.
You can also use the Web-app version of Office products (though it's far from the best experience in my personal experience) to get the same level of pick-up-where-you-left-off capability. I just double-checked this. Opened a document on the Word Web App. Killed the power to said machine and launched it on another and there was the text I'd just typed.
Like a lot of things, it's horses for courses. If a Chromebook can do everything a user needs and they don't care about it being from Google then absolutely use one but I suspect for many, like me, they just don't have the applications I need on a day-to-day basis. No way could I work in Office Online all day, for example.
No, I will not pay the bill. Why? Because we pay you to fix things, not break them
Friday 28th October 2022 08:16 GMT
Oh that brings back memories
Back in the day - mid 90's - when I was a hardware engineer myself the company I worked for was a bit fast and loose with the engineers it sent on site for various things*.
Basically if a field engineer was available and fairly close, they got the job.
Because as part of my role I repaired the PC's and and servers that came back to us, said field engineers would often call me for help.
I think I may have mentioned this one before, actually, but one of them called me to ask for help. Having hot swapped the drive in a Compaq Proliant (remember the big ol' towers that weighed as much as a small car and were the height of a desk? That sort). This was in the fairly early days of hot-swap disks to the point that the port colouring was still a new innovation to tell you a device was hot-swappable.
Anyway he had successfully swapped out the disk but then followed what he knew for desktops - booted to a floppy disk and typed format c:
Oops.
Mind you this was also the same guy who phoned me whispering to ask if opening the door on another type (I forget which model with age) would turn the server off. No hot swap on this one but a door interlock that yes, turned it off. He'd walked in an opened the door.
The thing is, he wasn't a bad engineer just not trained on the kit.
**Some things don't change, eh?
Your next PC should be a desktop – maybe even this Chinese mini machine
Thursday 27th October 2022 08:57 GMT
For about 10 years or so now...
...I have sweated my hardware for as long as possible. I tend to buy from a factory outlet and my last machine, a Dell gaming laptop (but not one of their rather garish Alienware jobs) cost around 1/3 of what it would have brand new - indeed at the time it was available from their regular store. And yet when it arrived, other than the box being generic and not having the usual array of paperwork and cardboard it looked and felt brand new. And by shear good luck I bought it in Feb 2020 just before prices and demand went crazy.
In the past and with family/friends, my usual refrain has been to swap the spinning rust with an SSD and possibly a bit more RAM and the response is always wow - better than ever. That usually gets a few more years out of a machine by which time I will have something a bit newer and faster to throw their way if needed.
And in terms of my working patterns - I found an office in the garden is the best way to separate work and life. Whether a laptop or desktop, just train yourself to leave it in their and at the end of a working day, lock the door and walk away as you would with any other job. Mind you, I also refuse to do extra hours like I used to unless they're either a) planned, or b) genuinely an urgent requirement.
I moved home just under a year ago and have only just got around to starting to lay a base for a new office but even in the spare room I try to be as disciplined as possible and clock off on time and then leave work at work. The other thing that helps - I don't have work email on my mobile phone. If it's *that* urgent to get a hold of me, call me. Otherwise it can clearly wait.
Linus Torvalds suggests the 80486 architecture belongs in a museum, not the Linux kernel
Microsoft ships non-Surface PC: a cheap Arm box for devs
Tuesday 25th October 2022 08:20 GMT
Re: Windows RT 2?
"...Anyone remember how Microsoft screwed their users last time by abandoning Windows 8 on ARM?..."
WinRT - Yes. Let's produce a device that can't run any Windows application because we can't be bothered to put a virtualisation layer in.
WinPho - Yes. Let's produce what could turn out to be an actually decent phone OS then screw all of early adopters by bringing out the next version and making it so that they can't upgrade to it unless they buy a new phone.
Buying any non-Windows compute device from MS other than an xbox seems to be a dodgy proposition.
To make this computer work, users had to press a button. Why didn't it work? Guess
Uber, Lyft stock decimated as US aims to classify gig workers as staff
Wednesday 12th October 2022 10:17 GMT
Re: YELLOW CABBIES UNION RIPS INTO INNOVATION
"...IN Britain everyone is UNIONIZED so the free economy is already a shambles. Competition in the UK is already pre-stifled. It took a lot of planning to destroy the British Empire. The US Empire is headed in the same direction..."
What?
In case you hadn't noticed, the British Empire has long since been dead - it's just unfortunate that certain people both in and out of power are trying to suck on a corpse so old it's no longer even fetid. On the plus side we did give most of the world a day's holiday to celebrate independence.
The unions are not half as powerful as they were 40 years ago and our economy is tanking due to many factors - Brexit, Covid, very poor government and more.
The US Empire? What is that?
Wednesday 12th October 2022 10:13 GMT
"...However inconveniently, polling shows that almost all users of "ZHC's" like them. Because only 1/40 people are on them and those 1/40 are students, stay-at-home parents with a few hours here and there, who like or need the flexibility that casual labour offers..."
Ok I will bite.
Since you didn't provide any citation for your claim that most people like them, I went off and looked on google. The search I used was "does anyone like being on a zero hour contract?" and funnily enough not one link came up to show a study that verifies your claims.
However you get plenty of hits back that discuss the pros and cons with very few pros. Plenty to suggest they can be harmful to heath (stress and uncertainty) and plenty discussing how you literally have no employment rights.
So I see your point - there seems to be s metric shit tonne of plusses to people who are on them </sarcasm>
Can you provide evidence to back up your claims?
PC shipments fall at fastest rate ever as businesses slam wallets shut
Tuesday 11th October 2022 13:11 GMT
No!
"...IDC had banked on suits still buying computers to offset the noticeable dip in retail sales, it forecast Windows 11 would underpin a massive refresh cycle later this year and next..."
Why?
Neither myself nor anyone else I've spoken to thought that.
Major purchase of laptops during 2020 and into 2021, despite the supply chain issues. Most companies by now have done a refresh to Windows 10 which is good until 2025 (beyond with extended support).
Why the hell would businesses refresh new hardware bought less than two years ago for an OS they won't be forced to upgrade to for another 3 years?
More than 4 in 10 PCs still can't upgrade to Windows 11
Tuesday 11th October 2022 08:59 GMT
Re: Nothing much against Win11 but can't see the point!
"...Few people even notice the slow, but steady, progress that has been made taming the Windows UI that has been kind of the wild west since Win95...
I agree with your points except this one.
Windows 7 nailed the UI experience (I don't really include XP because it was just too cartoon-garish out of the box, but arguably the stability started there with SP3). In fact Win 7 nailed the whole OS ideology quite nicely. It was pretty enough to be enjoyable to use, it was functional enough that it faded into the background, it was clever in how it performed certain functions slower than Vista, but appeared to the user to feel faster and MS seemed to finally be getting a handle on security.
Then the next few releases were a travesty. Windows 8 was a pitiful attempt to force a mobile OS on a desktop user regardless of whether they had a touch screen or not. You can argue all day it was an ok OS other than the desktop but given that's the thing people see and use, it's not a valid argument. And herein also began a pernicious trend with MS and Windows - you get what we want you to get and fuck you if you want different. Explain why, in the beta, you could set a registry key to give you a normal desktop but they removed it when it went live? If people had had that choice, then it wouldn't have been panned.
8.1 just tried to fix some of the UI issues.
Windows 10 went a good way to fixing them but continued the trend of mixing Control Panel and System Settings - you could achieve the same thing in two locations. And one of them didn't even have an OK button to confirm the change!? You could do silly things like zoom in on the taskbar icons on the right by pinching and zooming a trackpad. Why there?
Why did they add advertising into the base OS? Why on a Professional version did I get a frigging XBox Gaming Bar that I couldn't remove? Why did I get a bunch of telemetry that I could neither disable nor peer into exactly *what* was being sent?
Windows 11 for me has its own oddities and quirks that I've covered before but at least on the Enterprise version I am currently running the adverts have gone, though I am not a fan of the weather icon in the bottom left corner expanding with the crud it does - it seems to be basically a copy of the crap "news stories" you get when you launch a default Edge and just feels a wasteful distraction on an Enterprise version.
No, working in IT does not mean you can fix anything with a soldering iron
Friday 7th October 2022 09:33 GMT
Re: Mandatory tech support
I've mentioned this before but many years ago when I was in charge of a small repair workshop I got a call from a very irate customer.
"I spilled coffee on my keyboard and one of your idiot engineers told my secretary to rinse it under a cold tap* and dry it in a warm place!"
"Yeah that sounds about right...?"
"It's a fucking thinkpad!"
After they'd calmed down we agreed, whilst unfortunate, that had this been fully explained, the advice would have been different, and after all, sir, YOU started off by saying nothing about it being a laptop...
*Back when such a thing had about an evens chance of fixing such things (at best).
Brexit dividend? 'Newly independent' UK will be world's 'data hub', claims digital minister
How Citrix dropped the ball on Xen ... according to Citrix
Friday 30th September 2022 13:31 GMT
Re: Nice to Thisee the admittal
This where Citrix have let us down forever.
Around 22 years ago I became CCEA #54 and full of enthusiasm for them.
This, at a time when things like the MCSE gave you free software galore, I hoped I'd get in on the act.
No. What I got, other than an ever-shittier certificate (seriously from the CCA which had the usual quality certificate feel, plus the expected hologram to one that looked like it'd been printed onto toilet paper using a broken 1st generation deskjet ink jet printer from HP) was access to a CCEA-only website.
Which might have been ok except the only information on there was a list of exams you needed to pass to become a CCEA... ok then.
It tempered my enthusiasm somewhat.
Edit: This isn't limited to Citrix. Take MS as another poor example. They removed their technet subscriptions (years ago now) with the helpful advice: "Well most of our free trials run for 180 days". Cute. But what I wanted to do, was learn how to migrate from version x to version y, z or even aa, etc, because the client I am about to go to is using x and I don't have it installed.
Evangelist to cynic in 3, 2, 1....
Sophos fixes critical firewall hole exploited by miscreants
Wednesday 28th September 2022 09:55 GMT
Re: Ditched them months ago
"...The problem is likely that the free version will only use a single core, so as soon as you start loading up all of the bells and whistles (Snort is very bad for this) things slow down dramatically. If you're looking for a box to install the free version of XG on you want a fast single core processor, not a multi-core..."
Indeed - I had it running on various platforms from Intel to AMD with fast cores. Same with different hypervisors (Xen, VMware and Hyper-V) and no matter what, it capped. Even different ISP's just in case.
Out of the box with no changes. Tweaked. Nothing fixed it. No bells & whistles etc. I think it's just capped, regardless.
Wednesday 28th September 2022 08:42 GMT
Ditched them months ago
For years, I ran Sophos XG at home. It seemed to be very good for the price (free) but not only was it overly complex to do simple tasks, it never ran at full WAN speeds (and lots of posts on their forums stating this).
It capped out at 250Mb/s on 550Mb/s lines.
Swapped it to a Mikrotik Hex routerboard and haven't looked back - full wire speed and even IPSEC up to 470Mb/s. On a box that cost (at the time) £46 and draws 7W of power.
They aren't for beginners, for sure, but they really do just work. And their support is second-to-none.
(I have no affiliation to either vendor).
Amazon CEO says company will slow hiring rate, no hard return to office planned
Friday 9th September 2022 09:29 GMT
Not sure how much slower they can go...
...three times over the last 18 months I've been contacted by AWS looking to gauge my interest in different roles. Twice I said ok, tell me more.
Both times it supposedly went away to a hiring manager and I heard nothing back.
The third time I just said no thanks.
The crime against humanity that is the modern OS desktop, and how to kill it
Monday 5th September 2022 14:43 GMT
Re: Use Open Shell on Windows 10 (and I think 11)
"...Use Open Shell on Windows 10 (and I think 11) ..."
A valid response to the audience here/tech minded individuals, but:
1 - And I personally think this is *the* most important bit - you shouldn't have to! If you're using third party utilities to make the UX fit the ideal from 2009 then that entire UX is wrong
2 - Not happening in a corporate environment. It's a big enough battle getting any OSS in let alone something that changes the UX/UI from defaults
3 - Also would be unsupported by MS so point 2 becomes even more valid
Monday 5th September 2022 10:06 GMT
Re: It does suck
"...ersonally I have a laptop that folds around into a tablet and turns into a touch screen. Which UI metaphor should it use?..."
That's simple enough to answer, I think:
In laptop mode it should be the desktop experience.
When you fold it over to be a tablet, it should use a touch-based/mobile style interface*
A phone style UI doesn't work on a desktop with a mouse and keyboard - see Windows 8.
*Ideally the user should be given the choice here - I know some people would prefer not to use tablet mode, per se.
Monday 5th September 2022 08:46 GMT
It does suck
I installed Windows 11 on my daily runner because, working in EUC as we like to call it these days, it's always handy to see what will be coming down the line in corporate refreshes.
And yes, it's better than 8. But then what the fuck wasn't/isn't better than that?
Windows 7 had it nailed, I think, personally. It looked good. It was purely functional. Everything was where you expected it to be and it wasn't trying to search the internet every time you typed into the search bar. No drip feed of data back to MS, no Cortana etc etc - basically Windows 95/2000 but a bit prettier.
Windows 11 just confuses. The start button moves as you open things. Ok, that's not too much of a problem but it just feels a bit odd.
Start a command prompt with Windows key+R and type cmd and you get, as you'd expect, a command interpreter. Shift-left click on the taskbar icon and instead of spawning another command shell you get a PowerShell window.
Settings are still all over the place.
It seems to be a resource hog compared to previous versions. Just sitting with a few browser tabs open and a copy of a small Excel sheet open and the fans on my laptop soon go mad.
I hate the behaviour where if I hit the Windows key and start typing - previous versions of Windows used to start populating the search bar and would (usually) find the application I wanted. Not this version - it just tries to go to the application with the first letter I typed. I have to take extra steps to click in the search box.
I hate the reduced functionality - I've got it back with third party apps but right-click the taskbar and I want Task Manager there.
Every version of Windows since 7 has been a step - well several steps - backwards in terms of usability.
And if it frustrates and confuses long-term professionals, how does it make ordinary users feel?
'I wonder what this cable does': How to tell thicknet from a thickhead
Friday 12th August 2022 08:51 GMT
ISDN
Back in the day when ISDN was popular I was tasked with putting some audiovisual kit in one of a bank's main offices in Northants.
On the top floor the C-levels sat along with the videoconferencing room.
To be fair the kit was pretty impressive - it was one of the early cameras that could track a person as they moved around a room and it all went via a mixing deck and amplifiers and into a PC that was connected via ISDN to the videoconferencing platform.
I had zero knowledge of any of this kit but it went in fairly simply and test calls were made - all successfully. I tried to find someone to sign it off but no one was around (or wanted to, from what I recall), so a call to my manager who said to have one more go then leave.
A few days later, same manager was on the phone shouting at me for a) leaving it in a non-working state and b) where was the sign off?
Hey ho. Back I went.
When I arrived, we tested it and it worked.
<sigh> here we go.
Then suddenly one of the directors came in to ask if I couldn't sort out her connection while I was stood around doing nothing else ( ! ). So, since the video conferencing stuff was working I decided I'd have a look.
Turned out she also used an ISDN line to get external connectivity and apparently it wouldn't initiate a connection, but when we walked into her office to check, of course it connected straight away.
Ok, well come get me if it stops working.
Back in the videoconferencing room, it suddenly couldn't get connectivity.
Hang on... yep, her office and the VC room shared the one ISDN connection so when one had initiated the connection the other was left without one.
Never got an apology but I *did* get a sign-off before I left.
Businesses should dump Windows for the Linux desktop
Wednesday 10th August 2022 11:56 GMT
"..."another problem with Windows' single-user ancestry is that the default Windows user all too often must run as the all-powerful PC administrator".."
I suspect by this what you mean is that by default the first time a new Windows system is set up, the user details you use will be given local administrator rights.
However - this is only true of a home build. Every corporate using tools will not allow this and even with the zero-touch configuration of Intune, you have the option to not let the user be added to the local admins group.
The comment above about Excel being the biggest problem is spot on. Let's face it, here we are in 2022 and businesses across the world still run on Excel spreadsheets. We know that is a problem but it isn't going away any time soon.
Add to that, so many of the big software companies will do things like create Excel or Outlook plugins which only compound that issue.
You can avoid the whole online Office route right now by installing Office 2019 but expect that option to go away as soon as MS can make it disappear.
Applications, tools and plugins are the biggest reasons you won't see many places suddenly say "let's go to Linux as our main desktop solution".
Google's ChromeOS Flex turned my old MacBook into new frustrations
Monday 8th August 2022 12:02 GMT
Re: Alternatively
Even on Windows (and ignoring the rubbish built into Windows 11 to try and make users upgrade their hardware), the addition of an SSD (and possibly a bit of RAM) to any older laptop will make it feel like new. Or even better than new.
I've suggested to many friends and family that they really should save themselves the cash and upgrade to an SSD and all, so far, have agreed.
Those heady days of the late 90's and early 2000's where every new generation of CPU made huge leaps in terms of performance are long behind us and it's rare for your average user to need or even care about the latest and greatest developments in hardware.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
